The Crazy Ones
by Lady Elena Dawson
Summary: When Spencer, Hanna, and Emily are admitted to Radley for treatment, they know they need to make it out sooner than later. Then there's Aria, a patient for ten years with a double identity not even she has met. Together, they fight their inner demons to escape. Will the girls be able to save each other and get out of Radley? Or will they have to leave one of them behind?
1. Chapter 1: Aria

**A/N: Hey guys, I'm SO excited for this new story! I've got some insane ideas for it, and it's OT4-centric for once. (I typically write lots of Ezria. Speaking of, I have an Ezria story I'm working on along with this one at the moment.) Basically, all the girls are in Radley for a range of reasons, and they'll have to face their own problems along with the issues of their new friends. The biggest question is, will they be able to make it out? Or will staying there brainwash them into thinking they can't return to the world? Stay tuned!**

* * *

 **The Crazy Ones**

" _I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing."_

– _Tibor Kalman_

 **Chapter 1: Aria**

On the outside, Radley was like any other old building in Rosewood. It was built in beige bricks, with French décor on the windows and a wrought-iron gate surrounding it. Nothing made it special—except for the patients inside.

Because Radley was a mental institution, and its patients were over the charts. The people who stayed there had a range of mental illnesses, from schizophrenia to bulimia to depression. Anyone with a brain problem came there—and most of them didn't believe they had to be there, that they could be treated at home rather than away from it in a place whose reputation made them slip further down the rabbit hole.

Some would argue that many of them were right.

But that wasn't the case for eighteen-year-old Aria Montgomery. She'd been there long enough—ten years, to be exact—to know that Radley was her home, where she belonged. There wasn't much out there in the world for someone who supposedly split into two people, especially for those like her who didn't even realize it. At first, she truly believed there was nothing wrong with her. But the longer she stayed at Radley, the more convinced she became. That was it, then. She had a mental disorder, and, though she never expressed it, she was afraid of what she might do—what her other person might do.

As it turned out, Aria couldn't remember when she became someone else, this double identity that came out any time of the day that she'd never met. And apparently, she'd never told anyone else who her other half was. For the moment, and for the last ten years, she'd only been Aria and Jane Doe.

Now Aria picked up the yellow tank top and examined it, trying to remember the last time she wore a bright color. Was it seven, when she had the spring-colored dress of yellows, greens, and pinks? It was hideous, looking back on it. But she was a kid. Young, innocent, pure—and all alone in her head.

"Where are you heading off to?" Aria asked the blonde with her back facing her, folding clothes into a suitcase. It was a rare occasion to see someone pack their bags to leave Radley. The entire day they'd been visited by spectators casually walking past the room on their group meal time. Playing with the layers of the yellow top, Aria spread out the fabric and folded it across her arm before—impulsively—stuffing it under her in-style Radley robe. She liked the color; it made her smile, an even rarer occurrence than people being released from Radley.

"Home," the blonde girl sighed as she stuffed her few things in her bag hastily.

"Really?" Aria readjusted the balled-up shirt under her robe. "I assumed you'd want to go somewhere else."

The blonde spun around, hand on hip, glaring daggers at Aria. "Like where?"

Seeing the menacing glint in her ex-roommate's eyes, Aria just shrugged and sat on the edge of her bed. "I don't know. Paris, I guess. Somewhere far away from your family."

The blonde packed faster, more anxious. "And why would I want to leave my family?"

With a mysterious, unreadable smirk on her face, Aria simply said, "I think we both know the answer to that question." To most, the answer was cryptic, but to the ex-roommate, it sent a shiver up her spine and she zipped shut her bag, gunned it out the door, and met her dad in the lobby. She didn't look back until her dad took her hand, despite her being eighteen-years-old, and she dared to peek. There, in the hallway, behind the locked gates that separated the patients' rooms from the nurse's station, was Aria, watching like any bystander.

Aria wasn't a creepy person. But there was something inside her that scared the blonde teenager. Her alter ego, she guessed. Yes, Alison had told her she'd met her other half, sometimes in the dead of night when she nearly scared her to death. Aria stood in front of the gates with her arms crossed, like nothing was the matter.

Like she hadn't lost her third roommate.

It was common for Radley patients to be moved around, but a lot of the ones who stayed the longest kept the same roommates in order to keep the calm and serenity instead of sending some of the patients on panicked raids from their lives being chipped just the slightest. However, Aria was not the overly controlling type to have panic attacks from the people in her life being shifted around. In fact, it was more interesting that way. She loved meeting new people in Radley. It meant a fresh start to get to know someone before they found out the reason she was there.

Aria stayed in that spot long after Alison left. Turning on her heels, Aria padded back to her room and decided to clean up for the arrival of her next roommate—whenever that would be. She tucked the sheets tighter, fluffed the pillow more, and even dusted the tiny closet in which only a few measly dresses hung. They were the clothes she was allowed to have; the clothes her parents sent through the mail rather than gift her in person. They were all black, gray, or navy. The dark colors soothed her; but now, adding the yellow top to her collection, things felt brighter. More hopeful. If Alison could leave Radley, maybe she could, too. One day, when she stopped thinking of it as the place she belonged.

Propping herself on her bed, Aria reached out to one of the three dolls she brought with her when her parents drove her to Radley that chilly, wind-less January morning. At first the staff fought over whether she was allowed three or only one of her dolls; after all, the hospital supplied the children's ward with toys. But nothing could be done until the psych evaluation. Sitting in a room as her parents' anxiously twiddled their thumbs and the gray-haired man in the desk chair asked her question after question stuck with her to this day. When asked "Do you have any friends?" little, sweet eight-year-old Aria shook her head. "Only one," she'd answered, "but she's not here with me. May I play with my dolls now?"

Aria was in the process of brushing her Victorian-era doll's silky curls when a nurse knocked on her door. "You have a visitor," she announced. Calmly, Aria checked the calendar on her wall. It was a Tuesday; the only person who visited her came on Thursdays. Curious, she laid the doll down on her pillow and followed the nurse to the dayroom.

It was obvious who the guest was in the dayroom, as he was the only person not wearing a white coat or a beige uniform. Instead, he was dressed in a men's green dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and khaki pants. The majority of patients in the room were staring at him in fascination. The ones who weren't were too medicated to notice.

He turned around and removed his hands from his pockets when he saw Aria and the nurse approaching from the corner of his eye. Crossing her arms at her chest, Aria tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. When it came to strangers—healthy strangers—she was always ready to put up a tough front. She needed a thick skin for those who refused to walk around in her shoes and try to understand what it was like to lose control of your brain every now and then. To them, she was just crazy.

"I hope you don't mind if I get straight to the point," the man said while reaching out his hand for a shake. "My name's Ezra Fitz." Aria's eyes darted from Ezra's outstretched hand to his innocent face, but she didn't uncross her arms. The nurse stepped away to the corner for more privacy. (Not that Aria had to be supervised in visits. She was a good girl, after all.) Clearing his throat uncomfortably, he let his hand fall back to his side and continued, "I'm writing a book on multiple personality disorder. The staff here was very helpful in finding me a source. Please, sit."

Reluctantly, Aria sat in the chair he was gesturing to and noticed the pad and pens placed on the table, patiently waiting to be used. "What if I don't want to help you?" she asked as Ezra scooted closer to the edge of his chair and picked up a pen.

"That's completely your choice. Say the word, and you'll never see me again."

Aria chewed on the inside of her cheek. This man would very soon know that she'd be of very little help. And what else did she have to do today, anyway? She leaned back in her chair and held her head high. "Ask away."

Pen poised over the pad, he smiled at her as he asked the first question. "How many personalities do you have?"

The only question she could answer with certainty. "One."

Ezra wrote the number one and circled it on his pad. "And how would you describe this other personality?"

Grinning forcefully, Aria tried not to look sour. "I think it's better to ask my doctors that question. They've actually met her. But I hear she's a delight."

Lying in bed that night, Aria stared at the concrete ceiling and let her mind wander, about where Alison was to what Mona, her first roommate, was doing to what Ezra was writing. Who tried to understand mental illness, anyway? It was going to be a fruitless attempt at making every person in Radley be accepted outside these walls. But she appreciated his efforts.

Aria glanced at the barred window, where moonlight was seeping through onto the floors and walls. Maybe the people here didn't want to get better, or the people working here didn't want their patients to get better. Maybe the entire sanitarium was just a way of separating the truly insane or socially unacceptable from the normal, "healthy" outsiders. Her parents had given up on her; for years she wondered if they brought her to Radley just so they could continue the normal life they'd planned. No parent enjoyed bringing up their child's illness if it couldn't be explained away as "just a broken bone that will heal."

Somehow her brain was able to leap over these mind-consuming thoughts and shut down. Soon, Aria was dreaming about flying, flying away from this place, to an island far from Rosewood. She swam through the starry, moonlit sky with ease, her heart thumping in excitement as the island came closer. But then she glanced up at her wings and they were weighed down by chains. Down she went, falling to the ground, and was swallowed into the gates of Hades.

Waking up, she was standing in front of a window, her hands clasped around the bars and her eyes boring into the full, glowing moon. But she wasn't in her room anymore. Some time, as Aria or as Aria 2.0, she'd raised out of her bed and went into the closed children's ward.

She didn't know why she or her other identity would want to be down here in this damp, creepy, haunted place where cribs were made with bars and the dolls were missing eyes from the children digging them out from boredom. Maybe it had to do with how she'd stayed in this place for two years before it'd been shut down.

Maybe it had to do with rewinding time, to believing she was nothing more than a little girl who wasn't possessed by an unknown entity.

The faceless, nameless entity that she simply called many names. Jane Doe. Aria 2.0. Anonymous.

But her favorite name for it was a simple letter A.


	2. Chapter 2: Hanna

" _People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better."_

– _John Forbes Nash, Jr._

 **Chapter 2: Hanna**

This was not what the end of summer was supposed to be like. It was supposed to be chock-full of parties, booze, and boys. Instead Hanna Marin was curled up in the car, glaring out the window at the browning leaves of countless trees.

Trees, trees, and even more trees. So many trees the forest looked like a brown-and-green wall as the car zoomed past them. Hanna fumed, finding a sudden urge to jump out of the car and hack through those trunks with a giant chainsaw to get home.

Her short, wavy blonde hair fell in her face and she irritably pushed it back behind her ear. She had her arms crossed, her legs pulled up on the seat with her, and her forehead pressed against the cold window. She was so _angry._ Why hadn't her mom just pulled her up by the hair and dragged her to the car kicking and screaming in the middle of the night? At least then she'd know she wasn't going to Radley like a coward.

That morning, while eating breakfast, Ms. Marin told Hanna that she couldn't stand to watch her daughter slowly kill herself. In protest, Hanna showed her the bowl of Cocoa Puffs she was downing. However, ten minutes later, Ms. Marin proved her point by kicking in the bathroom door and finding Hanna with her head stuck down the toilet bowl.

"I eat _enough_ ," Hanna had fought as she, like an obedient puppy, followed her mom to the car with the small bag of belongings she was allowed to bring, which mostly included her designer clothes, Victoria's Secret lingerie, a Kate Spade purse, her stuffed dog from her childhood named Dot, and a "miniature" box of expensive jewelry. Ms. Marin told her, "They're going to take away your jewelry, Hanna, it's too sharp," but Hanna refused to believe they'd take away her precious things from a "mental patient."

"If they take it away, I'll just cause a tantrum and they'll realize how much crazier I'll be without my Dolce and Gabbana necklace and earring set," she spat. "After all, that is how you think of me, right? Crazy?"

Ms. Marin held the wheel tighter. "I don't think you're _crazy_ , Hanna, I think you're sick." She glanced over at her daughter, at the shirt draping over her protruding ribcage and bony arms.

To Hanna, she looked like a normal girl, with fat in the arms and the stomach and the thighs. All she wanted was to lose a little bit more; that way she could show off the abs and biceps she'd been working so hard on at the gym.

But to any observer, those muscles Hanna believed she had were nonexistent, wasted away by the lack of nutrients she wasn't consuming. There was barely any trace of fat on her. The scariest part, to Ms. Marin, was her ribs. It was an image most people only saw during famines. And her baby girl didn't even realize it.

"I'm fine," Hanna hissed under her teeth. She only vomited her meals because she wanted to enjoy eating without having to worry about the calories—and, therefore, fat—it added to her body. "I'm perfectly healthy, I swear."

No one could blame Hanna for saying that. After all, she couldn't see what everyone else saw.

"You've passed out at home more than a couple times, Han," Ms. Marin whispered, afraid that her voice would crack and she'd cry and make her daughter angrier at her than she already was.

And Ms. Marin believed with all her heart that she was doing the right thing for Hanna, despite what Hanna thought of it. She could never forgive herself if she came home from work and Hanna hadn't left the bed all day because her refusal to eat or let her meals digest had killed her. She'd read of parents finding their children on the floor, overdosed on drugs; Ms. Marin did not want to be one of those articles in the paper everyone read and pitied. Hanna needed the help; help Ms. Marin couldn't properly give her.

"You need professional help" were Ms. Marin's final words in making her point. Hanna rolled her eyes and continued to melt the glass window with her glare.

Then a boyish face crept into her mind. "Did you at least tell Sean where you're taking me?" she snapped at her mother. She'd worked so hard to lose weight to even get him to look at her, and now that she's had him for a couple months, she wasn't about to let him go because her mom shipped her off to the psych ward.

Ms. Marin glanced at Hanna from the windshield. "Sean has expressed concern for you too, Han. He'll understand why you're here."

" _Or_ he'll think I'm nuts for coming here and never speak to me again." She could handle everyone else at school thinking she was crazy when she didn't show up for the first day of school, but not her trophy boyfriend. As the "It" girl of Rosewood High, senior year was when she was going to dominate. Not anymore, she guessed. Maybe she could have a comeback story, bounce back when she returned and win everyone's vote for Prom Queen while working towards a 4.0 GPA, which was on her senior year bucket list.

"If he really wants you to get better, he won't think that." And that was the last conversation they had in the car.

Hanna held Dot closer as they passed the Radley gates and pulled up to the front door. There, a couple of orderlies were waiting, since Ms. Marin had given them the heads up that she was admitting her daughter that morning—an emergency, she said. She honestly was afraid that Hanna was going to drop dead any minute, considering her deteriorating body and the fainting and persistent vomiting Hanna thought Ms. Marin couldn't hear past the running faucet.

The orderlies were all smiley-and-rainbows as they helped Hanna with her bag—to immediately look through it and take out her jewelry. "Hey, I brought that for a reason!" Hanna growled, ready to pounce on them to retrieve her Vera Wang earring collection.

"We apologize, miss, but sharp objects are not allowed here," one orderly explained while the other finished patting down her designer sweaters and sweatpants and gave an "all clear" thumbs-up.

Heels clicking on the pavement, Ms. Marin approached after parking the car and kindly took the box of jewelry. "I'll take it back with me, then."

Sighing exasperatedly, Hanna stomped into Radley at her mom's heels and annoyingly snapped her gum while Ms. Marin signed paperwork. Disgusted by the ugly choice of wall color, she did a three-sixty studying the lobby, and shuddered at the wired age-old gates blocking the hallways to the patients' rooms. A scream echoed down one hall and Hanna nearly jumped out of her five-inch Manolo stiletto heels.

In a flash she was clinging to her mom's arm begging her to take her home. "I don't need to be in this _psychotic nuthouse_! Take me to a hospital! A psychic!" She meant psychiatrist, but it was close enough. "A voo-doo person! Just anywhere but here!"

Ms. Marin put an arm on Hanna's shoulder. "Calm down," she said as the nurse at the desk muttered something about upsetting the patients. "I chose this place because it's state-renown to have some of the best facilities for those suffering from eating disorders." She pulled her daughter into a hug. "I promise, if this place upsets you so much and you're not getting any better, I'll drive all night to pick you up. But you just need to give it a try. Trust me, if you follow what the doctors tell you, you can be out of here as early as a month."

Fuming, Hanna squirmed out of her mother's embrace and just stared at her, betrayed. With a huff she took her bag and followed the nurse to her room, leaving Ms. Marin standing in the lobby holding the jewelry box.

"The patients in this hall all suffer from some severe degree of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or both. It's not quite meal time yet, so they should all be in their rooms, including your roommate." The nurse smiled at Hanna as she pulled out her keys. "Bethany's a sweet girl. She's made a lot of progress. If you have any questions, she can answer them. Or, if you're uncomfortable with that, I'm the head nurse of this unit. My name is Debbie."

First Debbie knocked on the door, then she shoved the key into the lock. Hanna ran her palms over her pants and bit her bottom lip. "You lock the rooms?"

"No, not in this unit. But Bethany likes to. I hope you don't mind; she likes her privacy." With that, she pushed open the door.

A girl around Hanna's age, with half her golden locks swept into a bun, in a pink dress and a beige robe draped over her shoulders, glanced up from the book she was reading on her bed. A bright glimmer burst in her eyes, and she smiled widely. "You must be Hanna!" she fawned, then gave Hanna her hand. "I'm Bethany."

Forcing a grin, Hanna hesitantly took Bethany's hand and shook it. From head to toe, she didn't _seem_ that skinny or sick; she really was on the end of recovery. However, white lines caught Hanna's attention. There, along her new roommate's arms and face, were what appeared to be scars.

"If I can help you in any way, I'd love to!" Bethany exclaimed, snapping Hanna out of her trance.

Before Hanna could open her mouth and respond, Debbie interrupted: "Well, I'll leave you two for now." She set a pair of slippers and a beige robe on the empty bed Hanna assumed was on her side of the room. "Meal time is in thirty minutes, so be ready." And she was gone, leaving Hanna alone with a seemingly nice and perky Bethany.

 _Welcome to Radley_ , Hanna thought as she exhaled the breath she didn't realize she was holding. As she unpacked, Bethany talked her ear off about some of the best food in the cafeteria.

It was ironic, all this talk about meal time in the eating disorder ward. Hanna wasn't planning on eating any of it.

…

Oddly peaceful dreams of shopping and Sean followed Hanna her first overnight stay at Radley Sanitarium. She was right; she hadn't eaten the food at dinner. Not that it was unexpected in that unit. The doctors made the patients start with smaller portions so their stomachs could get used to it again, but didn't expect the newest patients to start eating right away. However, she'd been forced to down some Jell-O; but to Hanna, that barely counted as food.

She'd vomited it before bed anyway, even though it was sugar free.

That moment is what made Hanna begin to question whether what she was doing was healthy or not. Why throw up calorie-less Jell-O? Was it truly a habit she hadn't realized she'd picked up?

A coldness crept up Hanna's neck and she shivered. Blinking her eyes open, she groaned, realizing she'd woken up. A glowing golden halo hovering above her made her feel even more disoriented. What was that?

Once her vision adjusted, she realized it was _Bethany_ : standing over her with an ashen, menacing face. She clenched her hands into fist so tightly, her nails broke the skin of her palms and blood trickled down and stained the floor. Instinctually Hanna parted her lips and screamed.

The orderlies came and dragged Bethany away, who started thrashing around and even _biting_ her restraints. That's when Hanna noticed the knife in Bethany's hand—and the wet, dark slash over her stomach.

A concerned and ashen Debbie explained to Hanna that she didn't have to worry about Bethany anymore, that they were taking her to a higher floor where she will be dealt with. Gulping away the baseball-sized lump in her throat, Hanna watched, mouth dry and heart pounding furiously, as Debbie closed the door and she was consumed in darkness again.


	3. Chapter 3: Spencer

" _Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."_

– _R.D. Laing_

 **Chapter 3: Spencer**

"I don't belong there!" Spencer Hastings yelled at her deaf parents. "It was one time, _one time_!"

Suddenly, Mr. Hastings pulled to the side and braked the car, turning to Spencer. "Your mother and I both know that you've had problems like this before, Spencer," he said through gritted teeth. "And it's never just one time."

In the passenger seat, Mrs. Hastings bit her lip silently. Her eyes were puffy from crying practically the entire ride to the hospital.

Spencer grappled for the right words for seconds, almost screaming out in frustration. Instead, she reiterated for the fifth time that hour, "Why won't you just _listen_ to me?"

This time, it was Spencer's parents who looked defeated. She'd worn them down; now they _definitely_ thought she was crazy. "We're doing this for your own good, Spence." It was Mrs. Hastings first words since the other night, when they attempted to have a civilized, calm conversation with Spencer about admitting her to Radley to get over her drug addiction. But they should have known that was impossible, because what sane child wouldn't act out when their parents planned on shipping them off to a mental institution to drink liquefied dinners out of straws because they were strapped to the bed?

That was a bit dramatic, even for Spencer, to think of. She could picture what Radley was really going to be like: she'd be bunched up with the other addicted kids, and they'd have group therapy sessions where they blabbed about their feelings and cravings for drugs and blah, blah, blah. It wasn't going to be the first drug addiction meeting she'd been to. Except this one will be in an insane asylum.

When they reached Radley, Spencer stomped out of the car and waved off her parents' help with her bags. She stormed into Radley, not allowing the orderlies to help her with her things either, and commanded the waiting nurse to take her to her room now as her parents finished the paperwork. She refused to satisfy them with a proper goodbye, or any goodbye at all.

"Here in Radley, we don't always group people with similar problems together in rooming," she explained to Spencer as they walked down an empty hallway that reminded Spencer of jail. "We'd never let people with seriously critical conditions room with anyone." She saw Spencer's worried face and reassured, "Don't worry, dear, the ones battling the worst maladies are all kept on the third and fourth floors. The first two floors are all for those battling milder conditions, and though I can't say they're not serious, I can promise that none of them are violent or dangerous. Anyway." They rounded a corner, and for the first time since she entered this dreary place, there was a patient exiting their room with another, probably their roommate. They giggled and raced away in the other direction. "Aria, your roommate, is a sweet girl. Can't say she's the model patient… She's had some outbursts, but those were years ago. She's been here for a while, so I'm hoping she can help you settle in."

Aria? That wasn't a name you heard every day. It tickled Spencer's brain, and she clenched her teeth. Why did that name seem familiar? Did she know an Aria?

The nurse knocked on a door and opened it; it was unlocked. Somehow, Spencer's feet led her into what was going to be her new bedroom for the next—well, who knew how long—despite Spencer's brain screaming for her to turn around and run away. She wasn't addicted to drugs; she just needed to concentrate for a couple hours.

With trembling hands Spencer plopped her belongings on the empty side of the room as the nurse told her when dinner was for her "unit." Yeah, right—Spencer wished she was with the addicts. It would sure be better to be with people she understood—people drawn to a couple pills to make it through a day without collapsing—than whatever psycho this roommate was going to be.

Glancing at the other bed across the room, Spencer padded over to it and noticed three dolls lined up neatly on the pillow, sitting as though they were waiting for their mother to return. One had a poofy, Victorian-style dress and long, black curls and piercing blue eyes; the other was blond, tiny, with green eyes and a plain pink dress. The last one looked custom made, unique; it had a black dress that resembled the one Christina Ricci wore as Wednesday Addams, with golden hazel eyes and pink streaks in straight, dark chocolate hair. Its bow-shaped lips were crafted in a small frown, too sad for a children's toy. It was certainly unusual.

"Her name is Mona."

Spencer spun around, dropping the special doll, which landed on the bed and, thank goodness, not the floor. In the doorway stood the person who Spencer assumed was her roommate, a girl her age in a beige robe and slippers. Her hair was the same color as the one on the doll, but lacked the pink streaks; in fact, her face was eerily similar to the doll Spencer was just studying.

Aria. Squinting, Spencer's brain raked around her soupy brain, aching and pounding from what she assumed were withdrawal symptoms, and then _poof_! It came to her.

It was the third grade. Eight-year-old Spencer Hastings was playing hopscotch alone. For some reason, the gifted group of friends she'd made the beginning of the year would rather dare get a spot on a swing (in spite of being perfectly aware that the swings were the sacred ground of the bossy, know-it-all fourth graders) than stay on the sidelines with Spencer. Sighing sadly, she finished one round and glanced around the playground. There was a blonde girl in her grade sitting near the school doors nibbling at chips and pretzels, alone just like Spencer. Another girl from her grade, darker skin and black hair, huffed and puffed in an attempt to keep up with the sporty fourth graders who were hazing her for the swim team next year.

Then there was the girl, tiny for her age, sitting cross-legged under a willow tree. She was playing with three dolls. Her hair was curled and some of it was pulled back into a pink bow. It appeared like she was reenacting a tea party with invisible porcelain.

Suddenly, a nasty blonde girl known to be an angel around the adults and the devil's spawn around kids in her grade and below her, bothered to approach her and grab one of her dolls. From her spot, Spencer could hear her taunting the tiny girl, who did nothing but watch sullenly as she was berated for no reason. Then the blonde popped the head right off the doll and threw it at the fence. As she strutted away triumphantly, decapitated doll body in hand, Spencer could see the sad, lonely glimmer in the tiny girl's teary eyes shift to something darker, more hollow.

In mesmerizing fascination, Spencer watched, shivering, as the tiny girl picked up the sketchpad that was sitting next to her and whacked it over the blonde girl's head. Spencer waited in terror for her to keep bashing it over and over, but after the blonde stumbled and scraped her elbow, the tiny girl just stood there, sketchpad over her head, eyes emotion-less and black—and then she dropped it, and in an instant her eyes were a shimmering hazel again, and she began to cry. "I didn't do it!" Spencer could hear her sob as a couple teachers led her away.

After that, Spencer didn't see that girl for a couple days. The blonde whined and complained about the miniscule (more like nonexistent) bump on her head.

The tiny girl returned the next Monday. Everyone whispered in the hallway when she passed, new sketchpad and only one doll, the one she had to fix after it was brutally severed, in her arms. She walked with no care that she was being gossiped about.

And Spencer, bold Spencer, asked her to sit with her at lunch. She didn't talk much, but to Spencer it was better than eating alone. She blabbed to the tiny girl—Aria—about her boring tutoring sessions after school.

Then the blonde bully with the overly bandaged scrape on her arm hovered over them with a thundercloud over her head. Sitting down next to Aria, Spencer stopped breathing. But instead of the blonde shoving her or slapping her, she leaned over and whispered something in her ear that Spencer couldn't hear.

Just like before, Aria's eyes just cast down and she looked like she was about to cry as the blonde got up proudly and left. Spencer reached out across the table to grab her new friend's hand—she couldn't help but notice how the sketchpad Aria had been carting for a few days was still blank—but she backed off when that same sinister expression crossed Aria's face.

To end a long story, the blonde got attacked again, but this time her hair was pulled as she was pinned down. Again, Aria cried that she didn't do it. Spencer never saw Aria again. Eventually people turned her into a Rosewood Elementary School legend and called her "The Disappearing Devil in Disguise."

The nickname later changed to just plain "Ghost Girl," because some people truly believed she was just a vengeful spirit doing justice in the world by attacking Alison DiLaurentis, and had left once she'd done her job.

Traveling back to the present, Spencer shook her head and rubbed the area between her eyebrows. "You must be Aria," she said, deciding not to bring up the past. "I'm Spencer."

Aria sat on her bed and tenderly put her doll back where it was before. "Welcome to Radley, the only place in the state of Pennsylvania that will keep you here until you're dead."

Gulping, Spencer's skin went cold. "W-what do you mean?"

Shrugging her shoulders as though it was no big deal, Aria leaned back, propping herself with her hands. "They make you feel like you're worse than you actually are, break you until you believe it too—and I know you don't believe you belong here, Spencer, because no one who first comes in here does—but your parents keep visiting telling you that this way, you'll get _better_. I'm sure your parents gave you that spiel, right?" Spencer nodded. "Then, gradually, your parents stop visiting, and then it's just your brother, but that doesn't matter because he's being sent off to boarding school five states away anyway—and now the only person who willingly comes to visit you wants to pick your brain and make sense of all this. Trust me, Spence. By the time you should be done here, you'll never leave, because there will be no reason for you to." Glancing Spencer up and down, she added, "Your addiction problems will be nurtured here rather than chased away. Be prepared to swallow your pills every night."

Shaking, Spencer swallowed back her building tears and croaked, "I-it was just for a couple tests, that's it."

"And now it's for a lifetime." A bell rang in the hallway, signaling meal time. Brushing off some lint on her robe, Aria stood up and put a clammy hand on Spencer's shoulder. "Here in Radley, we get worse together. Don't worry too much, Spence. At least you'll have me." And she left, leaving a chilly breeze in her departure that made Spencer's knees give out. It was ironic, really: even though Aria said they had each other, she left Spencer that first day on the icy, concrete floor in a panic attack. She couldn't tell if her consistent trembling was from withdrawal or absolute fear that Aria was right—that she was never going to make it out.

And never had Spencer wanted drugs more than then.

Later, Aria apologized to Spencer for scaring her. She explained she was just crabby and pessimistic that day because she'd been there for ten years and still didn't know any more about her other personality than she did when she was admitted.

That first night, Spencer laid awake and stared out the barred windows while clenching the sheets in her fist. Her body cried out for prescription relief. She glanced over at Aria's sleeping form, peaceful.

Maybe she and Aria were more alike than she originally thought; maybe her eight-year-old self was right in befriending her.

Because as much as Aria had to fight with what she couldn't see or understand, Spencer had to battle with the same confusion. The only difference was that Spencer still had hope of leaving and living out her senior year.

Ten years ago, a little girl was deprived of a childhood Spencer realized she was lucky enough to have in spite of its intense lows. And she needed _something_ to distract her from her dry mouth, headaches, and screaming muscles.

What better way than to find a way to return that little girl to the outside world?


	4. Chapter 4: Emily

" _I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it."_

– _Vivian Stanshall_

 **Chapter 4: Emily**

With her swim bag in hand, Emily pushed open the doors to her new life—alone. In a silver Honda outside the Radley doors, Mrs. Fields took off in a puff of car exhaust and road dust. Mr. Fields was too ashamed to drive with them.

Not that it mattered that Emily's mom drove her to her impending torture chamber. She might as well have driven herself here, since Mrs. Fields didn't say a single word, not even a "goodbye," as she took Emily to something much _better_ than a Pray the Gay Away retreat.

In a modern era, being gay wasn't seen as a sin anymore. But in the Fields' household, Emily was surprised her entire family hadn't traveled the country to Rosewood, Pennsylvania to clasp hands, pray, and spray Emily with holy water. She told her parents she'd go anywhere and do anything to "fix" her sexuality, but she assumed rehab or some therapy, not a mental hospital.

According to the flyers, though, Radley was part psych ward part rehab center, and Emily was hoping she was in the rehab section. The flyers also mentioned intensive one-on-one therapy sessions for "ridding" the body of homosexuality, followed by consecutive days of seclusion therapy.

The last thing Emily wanted was to be alone in this place, even if the only person she had to talk to had half their brain cut out.

It was true that when Emily entered Radley, she was scared of the patients, frightened by those suffering from bipolar, schizophrenia, multiple personalities, et cetera. But as she stood waiting at the front desk while the nurse pulled out the forms her parents had faxed over the other night, the more she thought about how she'd never known people with those disorders—who was she to judge they wouldn't be hilarious, smart, and just great people? Why did everyone seem to throw these people on the crazy train when they were just ill, like people with any medical issue? Why were they treated like they weren't worth talking to?

If Emily had learned anything from how she was regarded by her conservative friends and family after she was caught making out with a girl in a dark closet at a swimming party, it was that people judged based on very little reason. The stereotype loomed, the faith boiled, and soon Emily went from normal, sweet high school swimmer to sinful, "sick" homosexual.

Just like every patient here, Emily finally understood what it was like to be labeled by one miniscule part of yourself.

"Your bag, miss."

Emily turned around and saw a familiar person holding her swim bag of belongings. "Toby?" she sputtered, eyes widening. "What are you doing here?"

She asked too soon, for she hadn't noticed the police uniform he was wearing. "Well, when I graduated last year, I took up the police academy. So, I work here—occasionally."

Mouth agape, Emily fumbled with what to say—after all, she and Toby were never really friends. He was just a brooding guy in the grade above her who was made infamous by how his mom's death was splayed all over the news stations. People were fascinated by the mentally ill, so when one of them was pushed off a roof by another, it made the media go crazy. Nothing really happened in Rosewood, so it was a big deal when something did.

People whispered about Toby in the halls. Emily just felt bad for him. It made sense that he was working here now, to keep the sanity in this place.

The nurse filed away Emily's papers and grinned politely. "Right this way," she said, motioning to the north hall. Awkwardly Emily waved a goodbye to Toby, then held her breath and pulled her bag closer to her body. The white-uniform-wearing woman gave Emily the same spiel she gave Spencer about how they liked to mix up the patients so they could find support in more than just those suffering from the same predicament, and to teach acceptance of a variety of poorly seen illnesses. "Though a certain hallway might contain more people with the same illness—like this one, which is typically labeled as an eating disorder hall—there are always a few rooms with mixed roommates. And here's yours."

Swallowing the growing lump in her throat, Emily pulled air in through her nose and felt her stomach swell and ache. She wished the nurse could have told her more than that, like what her roommate's name was and what she was like. It was enough she was here on charges from a family living in 1950, but now she had to deal with the possibility that her roommate could have from one, too.

A nice-enough-looking blonde girl sat on one of the beds in the room, holding a mirror up to her face with one hand and fluffing her hair with the other. She wore a fluffy robe and slippers. A makeup palette and tube of mascara sat, unopened, on the comforter. _How'd she sneak that in?_ Emily wondered. After all, the security guards threw out her favorite—and, if it mattered to mention, expensive—tinted moisturizer and mascara, the only makeup she really wore.

"Hanna, this is your new roommate, Emily," the nurse introduced the two, and Emily noticed the girl, startled, pull a blanket over the makeup. Then, "Remember, your session with Dr. Jordana is in an hour." With that, she closed the door, and Emily's stomach dropped to her feet. She was surprised it didn't just plop out of her and crawl away; after all, her blood kept fueling it with the noxious toxin known as anxiety.

"Um," Emily stammered while setting her bag on the ground. Her knees were shaking. Was she really in this place because she was _gay_? Just looking at Hanna and her scrawny arms and the way her robe was tied tightly around a very tiny waist made Emily realize there were people here with _real_ issues. Suddenly embarrassed by herself and her family, Emily made a pact with herself to never reveal to anyone why she was there—to protect herself from the possible reactions of those who would spit on her. She pointed to the makeup. "How'd you sneak that in here?"

Smiling mischievously, Hanna put the mirror aside and pulled her knees up to her chest. "It's a secret—but it's a secret worth telling." With that, she pulled her lips into her mouth and studied her nails.

Emily raised her eyebrows, waiting for Hanna's response. "Well?" she prodded as seconds ticked by.

Hanna glanced back and forth to the window and the door as if someone was listening intently on their conversation, then waved her over. Hesitantly Emily took a single step forward. With an "are you kidding me?" expression on her face, Hanna rolled her eyes and waved again. Emily took one step, and Hanna gave up and shook her head. "Fine. It's easy, okay? You talk to Prudence Finn, the girl a couple cells over, and you ask her for it. The next day, it's waiting on your pillow. And look!" she exclaimed and held up the eyeshadow palette. "It's an actual decent brand!"

As much as Emily wanted to be distracted by the makeup conversation, she shivered at the word "cell"—like she was in a prison. Maybe she was in a prison—the prison of her family's morals and beliefs. The jail cell of her burning-in-hell lifestyle "choice." The barred windows of her—

"So what are you in for?"

Emily's heated mental rant was broken by Hanna's nonchalance. Startled, she blinked rapidly. "What?"

"What are you in for? Addiction? Bipolar?" She noted Emily's jumpiness and shaky fingers. "Anxiety?"

What the heck was she supposed to say? Her lips opened and closed like a fish's. A bead of sweat formed at her hairline. Why was it so hard to come up with a lie?

Maybe because she'd been lying to herself most of her life and the last thing she wanted to do was lie her way through people who might accept her for who she was as they accepted each other for what they had.

Well, maybe. She didn't really know yet. She'd just gotten here, but she wanted so badly for that assumption to be true.

Just as she was going to bare her soul, a bell rang and Hanna bounced off the bed as Emily was reminded of the promise to herself she'd almost broken. "Snack time," Hanna groaned while stomping to the door. At the door she turned around to face Emily, who was frozen in the same spot. Raising her eyebrows, she gestured to the hallway. "For the whole unit."

Clearing her drying throat, Emily crossed her arms at her chest and kept her eyes on the floor. "In a minute," she said, just wanting Hanna to go away. Shrugging her shoulders, Hanna departed, and Emily could hear the conversations of multiple patients as they herded together to the dining room.

"Could you believe what Joan said—"

"That's so funny, because today I—"

"And then he asked me why I wasn't taking my medication and I told him—"

"Seriously, he's a drug addict? I had no idea! Oh my God—"

For the most part, it sounded, to Emily, like the fluorescent-lighted halls of Rosewood High. They weren't screaming. They weren't crying. They weren't begging for mercy. They sounded like normal, everyday people.

Emily sunk onto her bed and held her trembling elbows. It was strange, wasn't it? Because even though she wasn't the one facing a mental disorder or fighting an addiction for the rest of her life, _she_ was crying. Emily Fields, a healthy girl with a healthy sexuality, was the one who was broken.

"There are people with _real_ problems," she whispered to herself, and a tear dripped down her lip. "You don't belong in here."

Then why, the more she was reminded of her parents' sobs echoing in the house, did she feel like she did?

…

Five minutes later, Emily emerged from the room lower and more hopeless than when she entered it. She caught up with Hanna in the dining room and found her sitting at a table shuffling cards, an apple and some peanut butter untouched in front of her.

"You gonna eat that?" Emily asked as she took the open spot across from her. Actually, there was no one else at the table. Hanna followed Emily's gaze down the empty seats and pushed her snack away from her and to Emily. "I just got here last week," she explained. "Haven't really made any friends yet, and my first roommate ended up being a psychopath."

A couple of girls in the table behind them turned around and glared at Hanna, pissed. Biting her bottom lip, Hanna fell back down from their gaze and mumbled an apology. It didn't seem like Hanna was much in the talking mood anymore, so Emily attacked the apple and peanut butter hungrily, craving the food to fix her messed up system.

As she finished off her second slice, she glanced up at Hanna and saw her examining her fingernails again. Wiping her sticky fingers on a napkin, she cleared her throat and said, "You know, I didn't want to say this before, but you seem familiar… Do you go to Rosewood High?"

"I _did_ ," Hanna spat and reached for her glass of water. "And so did she." She pointed a finger to another girl sitting alone a couple tables over.

"Oh my gosh." If Emily had been eating the apple and peanut butter at that moment, she probably would have choked. "Is that Spencer Hastings?"

Rolling her eyes, Hanna sipped her water. "Damn, I was hoping there'd be one person who didn't recognize her. You try so hard to be popular, buying those Gucci sunglasses and dating one of the hottest guys in school, but just because some girl gets good grades and competes in, like, every sport, you—"

"What is she in for?" Emily interrupted, not paying attention to anything Hanna had ranted about.

Hanna shrugged and reached for an apple slice. Her fingers hovered over the fruit, but in a split second she pulled them back to her lap. "I don't know. Why does it matter? I just want to get out of here."

As much as Emily agreed with that statement, she was too consumed by Spencer to reply. Freshman year, Spencer had almost joined the swim team, making Emily extremely nervous—unlike Spencer, Emily had been swimming competitively for most of her life. She was scared Spencer was going to steal her chances of getting team captain, because the Hastings' always went for—and never lost—the gold.

In her dark side, Emily hoped Spencer was there after being caught taking steroids or Adderall, a common rumor that had spread in school last year, to get what she deserved for taking chances away from people who worked very hard without the help of something artificial. But for the most part, Emily was good, and her good side hoped that Spencer would make it out of this.

And Emily hoped that she would, too.


	5. Chapter 5: Aria

**Chapter 5: Aria**

The pen swerved rapidly over the pad paper, forming words Aria couldn't read from her angle. Like most of her psychiatric sessions, she smiled and answered every question honestly. Usually she was just given a refill on her prescription medicines. This time, however, the psychiatrist was holding the pen tightly, pushing the tip harder into the paper in frustration.

"How could it be that ten years, we haven't learned anything more about your condition, Miss Montgomery?" Dr. Phillips, a Radley newbie, flipped through her files. "Ten days spent in seclusion with doctors watching, and your other personality didn't come out once. They tried angering you, they tried saddening you, nothing. Yet you've been caught in the middle of the night with memory loss. How are we certain you're not just a sleepwalker?"

"She's a tricky one, I guess," Aria said with a shrug of her shoulders. "But she has come out before. I wish I could tell you more about that, but it should all be in my files." She didn't really like to talk about A, and A didn't really like it when people tried to talk to her. If she did, then she'd come out when the halls weren't abandoned.

Shaking his head and murmuring, he jotted down a couple more things and underlined them with three long, agitated swipes of the pen. He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands to think. In a way, Aria enjoyed being a brain teaser. It made Radley more interesting. Being trapped anywhere for ten years would get boring, even in a mental hospital.

Eventually he awakened and picked up his pen again. "I have a suggestion," he said while writing. "It's going to seem odd, but trust me, it has proven successful before." Ripping off a few empty sheets of pad paper, he handed them to Aria along with a pencil. "Write a note to yourself every night. See if your other self answers."

Aria stared down at the torn-off paper and pencil. In her hands, she felt like a detective. There was her new game: Detective Aria and the Unsolvable Case of the Double Identity. She nodded, a half grin creeping on her face. It was time to punch her other half in the face.

"You, my dear, are a very special case. But there are still so many options we can try."

Around lunchtime Aria received a visitor. By this point Aria wasn't surprised when the young man in the sweater vest was standing at their usual table. Why he kept coming back, she had no idea. She'd barely been a help; she'd listed for him at least ten doctors he could talk to instead of her. But yet here he was again—for her.

"If it isn't Mr. Big-Shot Writer himself," Aria said as she pulled out the chair across from him and sat. She crossed her hands in front of her to make herself look more intimidating. It was an act she'd been putting on in Radley for years so that maybe, she wouldn't break down. "Come back to the loony bin to try to read my forgotten memories."

Ezra shuffled around in a bag to retrieve a couple pencils, a pen, and his trusty notebook. "That's not how I see this place," he told her honestly, clicking the pen and posing it over the lined paper. His gray-blue eyes looked up to meet Aria's murky ones. Her eyes, it was one of the first things he wrote down in his notes marked under "observation." The colors inside them blended and changed like a mood ring. On top of the empty page he wrote down a color—amber-green: neutral. As in she wasn't feeling particularly glad or irritated by his presence. Based on doctors' descriptions, her eyes were browner—which made sense, because brown was the most mysterious of all colors, a blend of every spectrum—when her double identity came out, only for a second before the other half fled and left Aria behind.

"I have an idea," Aria said, tilting her head to the right slightly. "For every question I answer, you answer one of mine."

What harm could that do? "Deal," Ezra agreed, immediately questioning his judgement. "This other identity… Do _you_ have a name for it? Just something to call it rather than…it, or she."

"I prefer to ignore it" was her bold response. "Why are you really here? Why do you keep coming?"

"That's two questions," Ezra corrected her, setting his pen down. "And the truth is, I think you know more than you claim. My brother did."

Suddenly Aria's throat was scratchy and she could feel her heart pounding like a scared rabbit's in her chest before dropping to her stomach. She could feel it in her bones that she'd unknowingly poked an open wound. "Your brother?"

Shifting uncomfortably in the plastic seat, Ezra avoided looking at her face. "He had multiple personality disorder too, and my parents refused to treat it properly. They thought if they just medicated him enough it would go away, but…it didn't. I came home from school one day and found him with the empty bottle of pills in his hand and a gun in the other. It was his other identity that pulled the trigger. Or, at least, that's the story I created to cope with it."

Speechless, Aria turned her eyes to her clasped fingers and chewed on her bottom lip. She wasn't expecting him to tell her that much. She expected him to fly past it with a simple "it fascinates me." It was supposed to be a simple question, but that was an ignorant assumption, because there were people like Ezra who _wished_ it was a simple question.

Had her other half ever driven her to hurting herself? Shutting her eyes, she caught flashes of light and colors: a silvery reflection, a young girl with dark hair looking into it. Was it a mirror? A blonde girl, there was a blonde girl on the ground. Was she okay?

"When did this other side of you start coming out?"

Now Aria returned to the present and filed those blurry images away, waving them off as dreams or hallucinations—she'd had plenty of strange reactions to her changing medications. After Ezra was so honest with her, she realized she wanted to be honest with him. After all, who else would ever want to hear her story? Why not help someone instead of step away? "I personally don't remember much of this, so this comes from my parents." She tapped her right wrist and continued, "When I was eight years old, I broke this wrist. I called it my escape world. As an eight-year old, I didn't have any friends. My family and I had just moved back from Iceland and it was my first year there—not that many people noticed the new girl. So, I drew. When you're that young, you don't understand a lot of the world. But when I drew, my thoughts made sense, it made it on paper."

"Do you still have any of these drawings?"

Nodding her head, Aria dug through her pocket and pulled out three folded sheets of yellowing paper. "These were the salvageable ones. Most of them…I destroyed."

Ezra unfolded the papers, noticing how the creases were worn and thin like it'd been folded and unfolded multiple times, and spread the drawings out on the table. For an eight year old, they were impressive. One was of a doll on a windowsill; the scenery was sunny and trees blossomed, but the doll had a neutral, almost sad, face. The other was of a barren landscape, a cold, wintery scene. The last was of a little girl crying, one doll cradled in her elbow while she painted something red with her fingers on a sketchpad. "Why did you destroy them?"

Ashamed, Aria said, "The day I got my cast off, my parents took me home and fawned over how even though the fracture permanently damaged the joint—" To prove her point, Aria tried to roll around her wrist, but it could barely bend in any direction. "—I could learn to draw again. I tried—balls of paper littered around my room. That's all I can personally remember. But my parents explained that suddenly I was screaming, and they found me tearing my room, and drawings, apart. Like I was possessed by something. They couldn't console me. And then I stopped, looked around, and asked them what happened."

A single tear rolled down her cheek and, embarrassed, she forcefully wiped it away. Suddenly, she had the strong urge to run. "And that's all I want to talk about today." Slamming another piece of paper in front of Ezra, she got up and rushed out of the dayroom before Ezra could ask her what it was—and if she wanted him to come back.

Unfolding the paper, Ezra studied a poorly done drawing of a crooked house. Compared to the other drawings, it was, honestly, pathetic. It was obvious it was done by someone with limited wrist motion, as the lines were either stick straight or barely bended.

It was the creation of a depressed little girl ripped away from her Terabithia. The death of a young artist.

When Aria returned to her room, she slammed the door behind her and continued to rub her face raw. When was the last time she cried, anyway? And all because some random guy prodded her about it, made her feel like she wanted to help him after his sob story. "Aria?" She whipped her head up and immediately shielded her red eyes with her hands.

Spencer was sitting on the bed reading what appeared to be a physics textbook; she had notebooks and colored pencils to organize her notes. Even though she'd missed the first week of school, she wasn't about to give up on her valedictorian spot for rehab. Her parents had allowed her to enroll in classes and were sending her her assignments.

But now her focus had shifted from rotational kinematics and torque to her distraught roommate. "You okay?" she asked kindly, not pushy.

Aria peeled her fingers from her face and peered at Spencer as though she was trying to read her soul. "Did you know who I was, when you first saw me?"

Taken aback, Spencer shut her textbook and set her notes aside. What was the point in being dishonest here, where nothing left the walls? She nodded her head, guilty. "Did you know who I was?" she threw back the question.

Aria tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and also nodded, guilty. "Spencer isn't a name you hear every day, especially for a girl. You asked me to sit with you at lunch." Then, with a blushing red face, she prodded, "Did you know why I left?"

This time, Spencer shook her head side to side. "No one really did."

Aria kicked her slipper on the ground. "So people noticed?"

Though it was strange considering their serious conversation, Spencer smiled. "You fought Alison. _Everyone_ noticed."

With drooping, puppy-like eyes, Aria glanced at the window, and Spencer could see the moonlight reflecting off her watery eyes. "I didn't," she whispered. "A did."

In just a few minutes, the Aria Spencer knew had gone from a tough, take-your-medicine teenager to a broken down child. Spencer sat up on her bed, understanding that the conversation had shifted into fragile territory. "A?"

"My other identity," she explained, now staring down at her lap, at her damaged wrist. "The one who likes to hide in the day, seek at night. Like some mischievous devil worshipper." She built up the courage to lift her head back up and look at Spencer's face. "You're the first to know about A—the name, that is. The doctors don't know that I named it. But it seemed simple, explainable."

"For Aria," Spencer said, and Aria cracked a weak grin.

"For Anonymous," she corrected her. A was nothing like her.

Draping her legs over the side of the bed, Spencer felt her heart race, but she needed to ask that looming question Aria must have been facing since the moment she walked into Radley: "Do you think you'd want to leave this place?"

The night grew darker, and Aria climbed under her covers without changing clothes. "Maybe…" She reached for the lamp on her nightstand and kept a steady gaze on Spencer's face. "If I wasn't convinced that A will forever be tormenting me."

The light disappeared, and the room was covered in darkness.

…

Once Aria heard Spencer snoring (and that took almost two hours of straining to keep her eyes open), she crept out of bed and padded over on the tips of her toes to her desk. Pulling out a sheet of paper quietly, she scribbled a note on it and went back to sleep.

Her slumber didn't last long until she was shaken awake. Grumbling, she saw a dark silhouette hovering over, their hands on her shoulders. "Look who's here to visit," a feminine voice rang in Aria's ears.

When her vision adjusted, Aria nearly jumped out of her bed. "Mona?" she exclaimed. The petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl stood in a white robe at her bedside. "What are you doing here?"

"It's been so long, Aria," she said, reaching one hand out affectionately to brush Aria's messy hair behind her ear. "I miss you!"

Aria slapped Mona's wrist away and glared at her. "No. You do _not_ get to leave the fourth floor to come make friends with me again."

"But Aria," Mona protested, "I didn't mean—"

"Didn't mean to what, Mona?" Aria's voice rose, and her teeth chattered in anger. "Push a patient off the roof? Because you and I both know you're not crazy enough to do that! You feel lucky that she healed and didn't snap her neck." Ever since Mona had been hospitalized on the upper floors for that incident, Aria had felt betrayed. Mona was her roommate for seven years. They knew each other, and how they didn't belong there, like the back of their hands. In fact, Aria blamed Mona for losing hope in leaving Radley. After all, she and Mona had planned to escape together. And Aria truly believed that the Mona she knew wouldn't hurt anyone. When she first confronted Mona about it, about if she was protecting someone else, Mona played the mute act on her, and the doctors asked her to leave, as Mona was in no mindset to have visitors.

Aria had given up on Mona two years ago, but Mona liked to visit from time to time despite Aria's recurring fury that was hot enough to boil her skin off. "I don't want to see you. Go back up to the other lunatics where you belong."

The hopeful glint in Mona's eyes dimmed and was replaced by something sour. "You never let me explain, and you know that." With that, she turned around and left Aria in the dark with a snoring Spencer.

…

The next morning, Aria woke before Spencer and stood over her desk. Her cheeks flushed with icy cold.

There, in her handwriting, was _I want to talk to you. –Aria_

But there, below it, in a scrawl she didn't recognize, was a response she wasn't expecting to get.

 _You've talked to me plenty of times already. Or have you forgotten we're the same person? Open your eyes, Aria. You see everything I see. –A_


	6. Chapter 6: Hanna

**Chapter 6: Hanna**

When it came to being awake at nine o'clock in the morning, Hanna did not do it. But if she wanted to get out of this hell hole ASAP, she had to go to the offensively early therapy meetings.

It wasn't so bad the fourth time around. The last few sessions had been led by some cranky, pinched-face, middle-age woman, who actually made Hanna feel worse about herself. Who hired these people? Maybe she didn't believe she was anorexic, but Hanna understood, by common sense, that if people with any illness were to get better, people who reminded them that it was all their fault and they only had themselves to blame only made things worse.

That was Dr. Agnes. Obviously, she was terrible for pointing fingers at mental patients' life choices. But this new guy—oh my God. He was _hot_. Hanna couldn't believe she was admitting it, but he was hotter than Sean. When she got there five minutes late, she was more than shocked that there was an open seat next to him.

"You must be Hanna," he said, adjusting the clipboard on his lap so he could balance it and check something off. "We were waiting for you."

Even though she was a patient at Radley and he was probably an orderly, Hanna sat down and then loosened her ugly, plain white robe so that her expensive, light pink silk pajamas peeked out. She sat taller, straighter. "Might as well make the most out of my time here" had been her motto for the past two weeks. If a guy was hot, she was going to hit on him.

But this man didn't notice her sneaky, flirtatious glances. Instead, his attention was on the entire group. "My name's Caleb Rivers—"

"Are you a doctor?" Hanna interrupted, a cute grin on her lips. "Can I call you Dr. Rivers?"

"I was just about to get there," Caleb explained, and Hanna could tell he was a little intimidated by her by the miniscule scoot to the opposite side of her on his chair. "I'm an intern here while working for my degree in computer science at Drexel." He then pointed to a person in the corner Hanna hadn't noticed before because her eyes were too blinded by Caleb's jawline. Of _course_ Dr. Agnes hadn't completely left, she was just watching them with her hawk eyes now. "This is my first time leading a therapy session, so Dr. Agnes will be helping me with that. Some background information about me that you might care to know: growing up, I was put in a lot of foster homes, but the one I stayed in the longest had a daughter a few years older than me. To put it simply, she was suffering from an eating disorder. I think we can all relate to not wanting to get help from our parents and believing we can fix things on our own, or talking to a friend instead of a parent. However, not everyone is as fortunate to have friends or family that close, and many just don't seek help, and there are parents who don't want to believe the signs and reach out despite their child's protests. I don't really talk about it much, but Cecelia's parents wished she, or they, had spoken up before it was too late." He set the clipboard between his and Hanna's chairs, and now she was the intimidated one. This guy meant business. "I'm not here to tell you you need help or you don't. But none of you would be sitting here if there wasn't even an inkling inside of you that you want to get better."

After that, Hanna's mind drifted off. She didn't think she needed help, so why was she here? Oh yeah, that was right. Her mother just wanted to ruin her life, her senior year, her final weeks of high school popularity she'd worked so hard for that would dissipate like smoke in the sky after she threw her cap in the air.

"Now, I want to go around and talk about what, in your life, overwhelms you the most, to the point that you feel like screaming. That's right," he addressed the confused faces. "I'm not going to force you to talk about why you're here and your eating disorder. I just want to get to know you, and maybe, together, we can alleviate these pressures in our lives and see that hope at the end of the tunnel. Everyone has their lows, and everyone deals with them differently. But, since we're being honest, just looking at your faces, it doesn't seem like you see the hope."

"We don't," a girl who was nibbling at her nails spoke, and her eye twitched. "At least I don't…"

Caleb sat back casually. "Why not?"

"Because," she croaked, and her bony hands were visibly shaking. "My mom and I work so hard to provide for my little brother after my dad left, she can barely afford to send me here but I… We were so hungry, I decided I didn't need to eat if it meant Robby could eat more, I swear I don't need it…"

"Slow down," Caleb calmly requested. "Take a deep breath and start from the beginning. Can you remember when you started feeling this way?"

"Yeah. It was a couple months before my dad left, when I walked in on them arguing about Dad losing his job…"

Again, Hanna drifted out of the conversation and her brain started churning. The girl who was talking, Elizabeth, hadn't spoken a word since Hanna got here. But then Caleb barged in and suddenly every person was confessing. Elizabeth's issues were so much more severe than Hanna's, which is why, Hanna kept telling her mom on their nightly phone calls, that she was fine. Being fat at one point in your life didn't equate to raising your little brother with your mother.

"Hanna."

Snapping out of her trance-like state, Hanna shook her head and stared into Caleb's face. She knew that look. It was the look of sympathy and empathy in one. He must have thought she was thinking about her own problems, her own worries, when really she was scoffing over why she was here because she lost some weight to be healthy and skinny like her friends. She crossed her arms defensively over her chest. "What?" she grumbled.

"Your worries," Caleb said so gently. "What worries you?"

"Nothing," Hanna mumbled in response. "Stupid things."

"Nothing is stupid. All of the people in this room face problems every day, but what counts as a worry or a moment of anxiety is dependent on the person." Then he added, "You're in a safe place. All of the others have shared."

 _All_ of them? Hanna didn't realize she'd drifted off that long for all of them to speak. But she still didn't have any worries whatsoever. "I'm being honest," she said, more calmly and less angrily. "Nothing pokes at me until I want to scream in my pillow. I was voted homecoming queen and Peppiest Girl in the yearbook last year." To prove her point, she forced a glowing smile. "My life couldn't be more perfect."

But Hanna knew that Caleb didn't believe her despite being convinced herself.

At the end of the session, Hanna felt glued to her spot, and she wasn't sure why she was staying behind. Once the last person had filed out, including Dr. Agnes, Hanna stood and tapped Caleb's shoulder. "Can I ask you something?"

Caleb slung his bag over his shoulder and continued to collect his things. "Sure."

Chewing her lip, she asked, hesitantly, "Do you know what happened…to Bethany?"

"Um… I just got here, and I don't know a Bethany. Is that your question?"

"Well, no, it's one of them." Could this conversation be any more awkward? It would be so much easier if he wasn't so attractive. "Bethany was my roommate when I first got here. She was being treated for an eating disorder, but something scary happened…"

"Hanna, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to be hearing this…"

"Trust me, _everyone_ has heard about it. I'm just keeping you in the loop." Caleb reluctantly nodded. "Anyway, she stood over me with a knife while I was sleeping. It looked like she'd slashed her stomach. While she was rushed to the third floor, some of the patients heard what she was telling the doctors. Something about she was done vomiting, so she was just going to make it impossible for food to stay in?"

Wow, that sounded a lot worse when Hanna put it out in words. "I don't mean to just share some disturbing story with you," she explained. "But she seemed so nice when I got here, and the nurse told me how much better she was. So how does someone go from nearing the end of the path to recovery to…having some mental breakdown?"

For the first few seconds, Caleb just processed the story and headed for the door. "Honestly, it must have always been a part of her. They might have been treating her for the wrong thing. The eating disorder might have stemmed from her dominant illness. Is that all you wanted to know?"

"Yeah." Hanna gulped and clasped her hands behind her back. She'd gone from the possibly unbearable flirty girl to the frightened child. "I've just been scared that if I'm in here long enough…I'll turn into her."

The longer Caleb stared into her eyes, the more flustered Hanna became before the tension made her break the gaze. "I don't think you have to worry about that," Caleb reassured her. "Most people are like open books, and I don't see it in you. You'll get out of this place and recover. I promise." The warm, murky brown of his eyes sent a shiver down Hanna's spine and relaxed her tense muscles. "But I have another session to get to, so…I'll see you next time."

"Okay," Hanna murmured. "See you later."

Once Caleb's shadow had disappeared out the door, Hanna collapsed into a chair to calm her shaky nerves. She hadn't admitted her fear to anyone, not even to herself, but somehow that oppressed part in her brain lunged out and took control of her mouth.

She wouldn't lose her mind in this place. She couldn't—because maybe Caleb was right, and it just had to be inside the person, a part of them.

But it could very well be injected.

…

When Hanna went to lunch that day, she was surprised to see Emily laughing and chatting with some other girl at their table. "Hi," Hanna greeted cautiously and in alert. She'd had friends stolen from her before; she wasn't about to lose her roommate, one of the only sane people she'd met, to some frizzy-haired freak.

But when Hanna sat down next to Emily and saw the girl's face, Hanna recognized her. "Spencer?"

"Guilty," she replied jokingly. She was eating a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips that made Hanna want to vomit. "Rosewood kids have to stick together, right?"

"Hey, remember that time in sixth grade when John Kim brought his pet lizards to school and released them on _purpose_?" Emily reminisced with Spencer. Hanna wished she had food in front of her just so she could jab at it. She asked Emily if she wanted her apple, and took it off her tray. She allowed herself a piece of fruit every day, though the idea of "natural sugar" freaked her out as much as processed sugar. To her, sugar was equivalent to growing fat pockets on your abdomen and thighs.

A girl around their age, who was hiding behind her long, dark chocolate hair that Hanna was a bit jealous of, entered the dining room and grabbed a pasta salad and a banana. Quite a few people stared at her before darting away their eyes, like looking at her long enough would turn them to stone. Hanna had heard of her like she was a Radley legend, and watched as she passed them and sat at an abandoned table in the back.

"Can Aria sit with us?" Spencer asked, knocking Hanna out of her thoughts. When she realized she'd unknowingly taken more than five bites out of the apple, Hanna set it down in disgust. It was another quirk of hers: she barely finished anything when it came to food, even before she stopped eating it.

Hanna pointed to the girl sitting alone behind them. "Who, her?" Aria. Why did that name sound familiar? She looked at Spencer in surprise, speckled with fear. "I don't think so."

Spencer frowned. "Why not?"

Emily bit her bottom lip and could barely look Spencer in the eye, as though she was betraying the girl who she'd barely conversed with before today. "I have to agree with Hanna on this…"

"But _why_?" Spencer reiterated, more frustrated.

"Because we hear things, Spencer," Hanna explained in her defense. "I've already woken up to one crazy girl in this place, the last thing I need is another one standing over me in my sleep and claiming she doesn't remember getting there."

Standing up, Hanna stormed out of the room. She shook her head the entire way back to her and Emily's room, then collapsed on the bed and shoved her face in her pillow.

First the Bethany incident, and now Spencer, who was most likely going to easily persuade Emily, thought she could squeeze into Emily's life, which ultimately affected her life in Radley, and lug around some girl who was known for being dangerous and unreliable? Hanna wasn't lying: she'd heard the stories about Aria. One of them included a girl falling off a roof, and another included a blinded roommate. Nope, Hanna was _not_ going to let Emily allow Aria into their lives.

It'd only been two weeks. How had she not gone crazy yet?


	7. Chapter 7: Spencer

**Chapter 7: Spencer**

Later that day, Spencer was pulled out of her group therapy session—not that she was talking that much, anyway—and taken to a private room for what the nurse simply described as "some questions from the police." Why in the world would the police want to talk to her?

A sandwich baggie of ADHD pills was set on the metal table and slid across to her. "We confiscated these from your backpack," the male police officer stated.

Spencer's heart halted before pumping erratically in her chest. " _What_?" she yelled angrily. In fact, she was furious to the point that even her knowledge of the law was a fuzzy red. "Isn't that an invasion of my privacy, o-or something?" she stammered in an attempt to lawfully defend herself.

"Your parents gave us permission," the officer explained. "We gave the school a thorough drug search and came up with nothing."

Spencer's face drained of color. "N-no," she stuttered. "That can't be right!"

"Why not?"

Never in Spencer's eighteen years had she sweated so much in five minutes. Whoever this cop was, he was good—and she said that because usually she was so calm and collected around any authority figure, even if she'd done something wrong and knew it. "B-because I got those—" She pointed to the pills. "—in school! Right out of someone's pocket! They carried them around all the time!"

"Who sold you these?"

The last thing Spencer wanted to label herself as right now next to "drug abuser" and "addict" was "rat." She kept her mouth shut.

"Who sold you these?" he repeated calmly, and Spencer squinted at his name tag.

"Toby," she read, even though she already knew who he was. She grew an innocent smile on her face. "I must be confused. I meant to say I found them in school."

Now Toby was the one who was confused. "How is that?"

"Well," Spencer sighed, preparing herself to whip up a story in milliseconds. "There is someone in the school who sells those pills, but they use a secret hiding place in the bathrooms, taped under the sinks. So you leave a piece of paper with your name on it and some cash, and then the next day, it's there." Spencer let out the breath she was unknowingly keeping hostage. Good one, she proudly congratulated herself.

But Toby didn't seem to buy it, by the stern glare on his chiseled face. Spencer's heart pounded. Then, Toby's face softened, and Spencer felt her heartrate go down. "I didn't want to have to tell you this," he said and took a few steps to the wall, hands on his hips. "But since school started, people have known where you are. And a couple of them, in fear of ending up here, I guess, have fully confessed to us about where and how they bought these drugs."

Spencer's fingers froze along with her pride. It was over, she thought. Her iced pride cracked, then shattered. Her entire life trying to be at the top, be the best person… It was done. People knew now how she got to where she was, even if it was for a short period of time. When she got out of here, she had to start at the bottom where no Hastings had gone before.

And in order to make it to the top again by the end of the year, she had to get out now. What better way, she began to brainstorm as a devious grin crossed her lips, than for a police officer—a trusted member of society—to take her out? She'd be able to get to her parents, convince them to have her stay, and she'd be able to work on her homework at her desk that motivated her because of all the trophies scattered on it rather than on her bed at Radley where she peered at Aria every minute in case she met A.

Clasping her hands on the table (it always made her feel more powerful), she looked up and directly into Toby's Husky-blue eyes. "Toby," she said, straightening her back, too. "It'd be a lot easier for me to find who gave me those drugs if I was back in Rosewood."

Obviously, Toby wasn't stupid, or he wouldn't have made it past day two in the police academy. Standing, he placed his hands on the table and leaned down so that he was close enough to Spencer's face without it being odd but still effective. "I don't have much power in this place unless I'm an orderly, nurse, or your parent." It was a desperate move, anyway. Straightening up, he headed to the door. "I think you need the help, Miss Hastings." And he set a card down on the table. "For when you remember who gave you those drugs…"

The door clicked behind him as Spencer picked up the card. Toby Cavanaugh. The son of Marion Cavanaugh. Spencer's mother, Veronica, had worked on that case when Toby's family sued the institution. Ever since then, people avoided his eyes at school and pretended he was a nonexistent figment, like a ghost. No one really wanted to deal with the kind of baggage he had.

But at least he was putting that grief into some use and helping others.

When Spencer opened the door to her shared room with Aria, she halted in the doorway as the sound of a book slamming shut reverberated off the brick walls.

There, huddled on her bed, was Aria, surrounded by textbooks. Literature and composition, physics, biology, government—they were all advanced placement classes Spencer was enrolled in. "I'm sorry," Aria squeaked as she jumped off the bed, abandoning the literature book she was reading behind. "There were just so many short stories in there… _A Good Man is Hard to Find_? I might have nightmares!" It was an attempt to lighten the situation in case Spencer was furious, which she wasn't.

Spencer walked over to the side of her bed and began stacking the books. "If you want to read them, you can."

However, when Spencer turned back around, instead of seeing Aria plastered with a joyful grin like she'd expected, there were tears brimming around her eyes. "It's just…" She stepped back until she found her bed and sat on it. "My educational level is only up to eighth grade. They don't really teach high school level, or _anything_ here. And my 'education' only came from the library because I love school." Then, a sigh. "Loved," she corrected herself. "It's hard to love something you haven't had since you were eight years old."

A light bulb clicked on in Spencer's brain and her face lit up. "I can tutor you!"

A skeptical expression contorted Aria's face. "No, thank you." She grabbed the old, yellowed penny novel off her nightstand. It wasn't even a good book, but it was a great distractor and conversation ender.

"Why not? Don't you want to finish high school and—" Then Spencer remembered Aria had never even started high school, or middle school, _or_ finished elementary school. If she did make it out of Radley, would she bother going to high school, or just find a minimum wage job? Didn't her family abandon her here? Feeling insensitive, Spencer cautiously treaded back on the topic. "I mean, if you're interested in knowing more about this stuff or you need to know more of the basics to understand this stuff, I'm here."

A crooked grin turned up the corners of Aria's lips. "Thanks."

Stomach growling and crying out in hunger, Spencer headed towards the door to go to the cafeteria to get a snack. "No problem," she said, proud of herself, and one foot was out the door before she pulled it back in. "And by the way…" She grabbed the literature textbook and opened it to a specific page. "Poe is the _best_."

Aria's eyes widened as she snatched the book from Spencer and, in awe, saw an entire chapter dedicated to the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. She'd heard of Poe from other patients, the kind that came in and out of Radley after only short treatments, but the Radley library strictly prohibited anything that could mess with a patient's mental health. That included anything that involved talking ravens, sisters that were buried alive, or a drunk joker sealed behind a wall. Aria's fingers, plain compared to Spencer's navy blue polished ones, tenderly skimmed the pages of the book. It was the door to knowledge she'd never been able to reach before. "Do you remember those giant literature books the fourth graders would get?"

Keeping silent, Spencer just nodded, not wanting to slip up again and make some ignorant comment. Of course Spencer remembered those books; they were huge and heavy for nine year olds, but they had dozens of fun, intriguing stories for fourth grade English class. It was the worst thing to lug around.

Aria scoffed to hide most of the pain she was feeling underneath. "All of the fourth graders complained about it, but…I was looking forward to reading that book."

The last thing Spencer did before she took off to the cafeteria was show Aria her giant tote of novels her parents had smuggled in through a bribe. This time, Aria cried in what Spencer could only describe as happiness from the ignorant who was restricted from being anything but ignorant.

…

After dinner, Spencer wasn't surprised that she hadn't seen Aria there. However, she was surprised when she was pulled aside again and led to the same room she was in that afternoon.

Officer Toby made no introduction and went straight to the point. He slapped a photo of a blonde girl in front of Spencer. "Your friend's previous roommate has gone missing. Reports show she has a tendency to be found roaming the halls in the middle of the night with no memory; security footage shows a dark figure sneaking out every now and then. That person was seen leaving and returning between the times Alison—" He tapped the picture. "—disappeared. It's likely that she could have escaped and hurt Alison."

"Alison DiLaurentis was in Radley?" A hand came up over Spencer's mouth in shock—shaken to the core. How could such a seemingly perfect It girl go from the Queen of Rosewood High to a mental patient? "But why would Aria want to hurt Alison?"

"You tell me."

"How can I tell you? I've only known her for a couple weeks." Toby scratched his chin, his eyebrows furrowed in intense concentration, while Spencer swallowed the frozen bulge in her throat. "Toby…" He looked at her, hopeful that she was going to say something productive to the case. "Don't you remember Alison?"

By the uncomfortable way he shifted his body weight on his feet and avoided Spencer's eyes, Spencer knew he remembered. "Doesn't that mean anything? Alison was a terrible person! So many people hate her."

"Is there a reason you're defending your roommate so strongly despite knowing her for only a couple weeks?"

Spencer opened her mouth, but faltered and pursed her lips. It was pointless to argue. If she brought up knowing Aria as a child, that would mean explaining seeing Aria attack Alison on more than one occasion, which the police would find out soon enough. Then Aria would be locked in here forever, especially if Alison was dead somewhere and Aria _was_ unknowingly sneaking out. And Spencer could never live with herself knowing that a perfectly kind, misunderstood and kooky child had turned into some murderous, blood thirsty individual. Hope bred eternal misery, but hope she had on the human race.

"Aria Montgomery is not the victim here. Alison is," Toby reminded her, though Spencer wanted to speak up and protest until she couldn't make her point any clearer. "Aria had a roommate that was blinded, and Aria was the only one around, with another firework in her hands. It was lucky the place hadn't burned down. Then another patient was pushed off the roof, and guess who was there? Aria—with a knife in her hands."

"But she wasn't convicted for that," Spencer defended her new friend. "She told me that story. It was her roommate that did it. And it's not like it's that hard to plant a weapon on someone vulnerable to make them look suspicious. A weapon, I may add, that wasn't even used."

But maybe Toby was right. After all, Spencer only knew Aria when she was a kid, but she wasn't the child in _The Bad Seed_. Nonetheless, that didn't mean innocence lasted forever. Alison's bullying had affected the majority of their class and the classes under them, but Aria was the only one who'd ever snapped.

One of Toby's eyebrows lifted, wrinkling his forehead. "What roommate?"

"Mona," Spencer explained. "So there were two other people when that girl was pushed. Mona confessed to it and they took her upstairs because she was a danger to others." Aria did tell Spencer, though, that they considered her as a suspect at one point, that Mona was protecting Aria because Aria's DNA—some blood—was on the girl, but not Mona's. But Mona was scratched up, too, and Aria believed she'd probably tried to stop her from pushing the girl, and Spencer chose to believe Aria because who else could she trust in this macabre place?

Toby pulled out a manila folder and flipped through some paperwork. "That's odd," he murmured. "The record only mentions Aria."


	8. Chapter 8: Emily

**Chapter 8: Emily**

For two sessions, Emily had been getting "treated" for her sexuality. Two sessions, and Emily thought she was going to scream.

"This is how your treatment is going to go," her doctor had said on their first meeting. "It's mostly hypnotherapy followed by behavioral adjustments. For example, we'll put you in a room with another woman who will approach you, and every time you'll have to say no until you don't feel the urge to say yes."

Like she was sick and needed curing. Emily had only been in Radley for a couple weeks, and she already knew that her "illness" was not some chemical imbalance in her brain. However, her doctor talked it up like it was some curable disease.

"Lie down," the therapist now instructed her, and Emily sat still, rigid. What was she doing here exactly? She had no clue—but she knew she had to get out of here. Whipping up onto her feet, she walked toward the door, but the knob didn't budge.

It was locked.

Her hand slipped to her side, shaking, and she felt something chilly—a calloused hand with a pill cozied in in—lead her back to the couch, and her spine shivered from her tailbone to the base of her neck. This time she didn't ask questions when the pill was handed to her and she gulped it down dry. Some calming medicine, or something. She didn't care. She would take _anything_ to get through another homophobic session in this insane place.

When she was ordered to lay down again, she didn't hesitate or make a dash for it. She rigidly set her back on the sofa and stared at the white ceiling, the blinding light making her eyes water. It would have been no different if they had propped her on a surgical table and prepared to cut her brain open. If homosexuality was a disease uncured by lifetime bottles of pills, then maybe they'd just remove the part of her brain capable of feeling romantic towards others and end this now.

Though she felt completely shut down, her mind subconsciously listened to the instructions of the therapist, and her eyes were closed. Slowly her thoughts and feelings were overcome with disgust towards any woman who flirted with her or asked her on a date. Her brain watched and listened, but her heart felt sick at what the brain was suppressing.

Once the session was over, Emily walked out like a zombie. Why couldn't she just get the _One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest_ ending and get a part of her brain lobbed out? Or maybe she didn't need to. She walked to the cafeteria in a zombie-like state, the fluorescent lights straining her eyes and making her head pound.

"Whoa there."

A pair of hands flew out and knocked Emily backwards. Rapidly Emily blinked, and just like that her post-therapy trance was gone.

A familiar blonde stood in front of her in a spotless white robe. "Alison…?" Emily trailed off, confused. Spencer had informed her and Hanna at breakfast that morning about the current investigation into Alison's disappearance and Aria's strange connection to it.

"Why would we believe Aria?" Hanna had snapped at Spencer. Emily had hushed her, since Aria wasn't that far away, at the same table, alone, as yesterday. This time Spencer hadn't advocated her sitting with them.

"Because maybe the institution wanted to protect Mona and keep her out of the report—after all, Aria was easier to protect than Mona was," Spencer had muttered under her breath. "Aria doesn't remember when she becomes this person. She couldn't control it. Easy explanation. Mona, on the other hand, was aware of what she was doing, or at least that's what Aria was told. Case closed. The police don't need to get involved and cause media attention."

"What was Mona being treated for, anyway?" Emily had inquired, absorbed in the case. It was a lot more fascinating than her one-on-one therapy. Everyone else got to interact with groups, but if lesbians and gays were put in a room together, _chaos_ would ensue, Emily ranted in her mind sarcastically.

Spencer had bitten her lip and swirled around her applesauce. "I have no idea."

"Then ask her!" Hanna had jabbed a finger at Aria. But by the look on Spencer's face, Emily had known Spencer most likely wasn't going to interrogate her roommate just yet. Sleuthing first, cross-examining later.

"No," the blonde currently in front of her responded, puzzled.

Emily's vision of Alison in the flesh and there with her morphed into someone she _didn't_ recognize. "Sorry," Emily mumbled, rubbing her head. "Drugs are…weird."

"Drug addict, huh?" the nameless blonde rashly stated, like it was just a normal chat with a stranger in front of the locally frequented froyo shop.

Emily's nose wrinkled as a twinge of pain shot through her skull behind her eyebrow. "No, no, just…" But she didn't want to say it—she couldn't. "It doesn't matter. I'm sorry again for getting in your way."

A warm, smooth hand caught hold of Emily's elbow as Emily attempted to continue on her way. "Wait, you seem upset. Want to talk about it?"

 _Wow, this girl is audacious_ , an astounded Emily thought. "To a stranger? I'm not comfortable with that."

"Then let's not be strangers." She held out her hand to shake. For the first time Emily noticed how glowing this girl's smile was, almost as sparkling as her eyes. However, Emily felt a tiny ball of dread in the pit of her stomach, like those eyes were hiding something much darker underneath. Emily avoided it and shook her hand anyway. "I'm Bethany."

"Emily." She then cocked her head in recognition. "Bethany… Did you ever have a roommate named Hanna?"

Bethany's permanent smile didn't even twitch as she confidently replied, "Nope! It's just been me and Sara!"

Emily's curiosity in this Bethany person was interrupted by a growl, and she knew she had to eat something before her stomach ate itself. "Well, it was nice to meet you, but I really should get going."

Though that phrase sprouted frowns on most people's faces, Bethany, again, didn't lose the impeccable grin. "That's fine!" She waved it off. "It was nice to meet _you_!"

Bethany didn't even cross Emily's mind as Emily swooped into the dining room like a gravely peckish seagull and grabbed a tray. She barely greeted Hanna and Spencer when she plopped down at her seat and inhaled some mashed potatoes.

Hanna watched in disgust. "Hello to you, too."

"I'm starving," Emily muttered between bites—well, more like swallows. "Anything new since this morning?"

Spencer sighed. "No. I haven't even seen Aria all day."

Emily started on her steak, almost snapping the knife's plastic neck—because plastic knife equaled safety, and so did metal fork. Forks weren't weapons, too; just knives. She took a gigantic bite out of her apple. Within eight minutes, she had cleared her tray and was verbally debating with herself whether to get another apple or a brownie.

"The brownie, of course," Hanna chimed in despite it being a private conversation with Emily and…Emily. "You could use some more weight."

Awkward tension stifled the air around Spencer and Emily as they clamped their mouths shut in case they said something stupid in this terribly ironic situation. "I'm thinking of going back to Rosewood High soon, too," Emily explained. "That means still watching my diet so I can be in the best shape I can be for swimming."

Swimming. Emily had forgotten in this Radley madness that she'd been voted captain. She probably lost it now, to Paige or Sydney. It was her long-term high school goal, and because of one slip up at one party with one girl, she was shipped off. What were people going to say when she returned—when _they_ returned?

Just imagining the comments and stares she was going to get in the hallways of Rosewood made her stomach knot together. It wasn't that all her classmates were homophobic; it was just the reputation of being in a mental institution. Once people found out she was there for her sexuality, they'd say even more disgusting things in the hallway. Like she was such a nymphomaniac who couldn't control her urges or something, and the girls didn't feel safe.

Despite it all being conjecture, Emily could feel her stomach gurgle and churn. "I think I'm just going to go to my room," she uttered while standing up, abandoning the brownies and apples.

Hanna sighed and picked at her fingernails. "Me too. I need to see if Prudence will pass by so I can get some nail polish." She showed them her peeling neon green tips. "I don't think my nails have ever been this ugly."

But before Hanna and Emily could make their escape, Emily was prompted to sit back down when a short, yet intimidating, figure cast a shadow over the table. "Hi, Spencer," Aria weakly stammered. There was a chip in her index fingernail that she nervously picked at. Suddenly Aria had transformed from an unapproachable scary figure to nothing more than a messed-up, lonely individual. Her lips twitched anxiously as she darted back and forth between Hanna and Emily, like looking at them long enough would steal her soul. "I was just going back to the room, and I was wondering, where's that Brontë book you told me about?"

Spencer smiled, though Emily could see the doubt flickering in Spencer's eyes. "In the second drawer of my nightstand."

Aria nodded her head and licked her cracking lips. "Thanks." She waved shyly to Hanna and Emily. "Nice to meet you."

Hanna shuddered. "Well, now I'm going to wait until she's farther away to get out of this seat."

"Hanna!" Emily berated her.

"What?" she exclaimed.

"You can be a little sensitive!"

"Not to her," she stated firmly. Then, changing the subject, "How's your gay therapy been going?"

Aria, who'd heard everything but took none of it personally anymore, whipped around and stormed back to the table. "You're being treated for homosexuality here?"

The draining of color on her face caused Emily's heart to start pounding against her chest cavity. "Yeah… Why?"

In a whisper, Aria cryptically warned, "Never let them take you to the third floor," shivered, and darted away before Emily could ask anymore questions.

"The third floor?" she panicked. "What's on there besides the really crazy ones?"

Spencer had also paled dangerously. "The operating rooms."

A hot flash passed through Emily, and everything was woozy and she wanted to vomit. "They wouldn't…really cut my brain open, would they?" She thought it was the best solution before, but mostly because she believed it wouldn't happen.

In an attempt to calm down Emily, Spencer reassured, "I know it seems scary, but those practices are so outdated, especially with the advancement in the understanding of homosexuality. And even back then, it was more likely to get electroshock therapy."

"Electroshock?" Emily almost screamed, and Hanna jumped in her seat at the increase in volume. "As in an electric chair?"

No longer able to breath, Emily darted out of the dining room and sprinted all the way to her room, where she collapsed on her bed and stuffed her face in her pillow. Maybe this was all a nightmare, and she'd roll away from the darkness provided by the pillowcase and she'd be back home, her mom calling her down for dinner as she wrapped up her homework.

But when Emily peeked an eye out every five minutes, she was still in Radley, stuck in gooey, inescapable fear.

…

The clock struck one o'clock in the morning and Emily still couldn't sleep. She could barely shut her eyes. How could Hanna sleep so peacefully, when she was close on the brink of death? Emily was on the edge of being electrocuted and she was having heart palpitations. If she knew the doctors were planning on giving her a shot in the middle of the night to make her fall into an endless sleep because she had an incurable sickness, she'd probably be vomiting all over the place and passing out every five seconds.

The window. Emily hopped out of bed and grasped the bars surrounding the dirty pane until her knuckles were white. She yanked, she struggled to move one bar, maybe break one off. They weren't budging. Tears overflowed and dripped helplessly off her chin. Maybe if she pulled harder, motivated herself that she was stronger than this…

A pair of hands draped over Emily's. "Em."

Hanna was out of bed and gently coaxed Emily out of letting go of the bars. Her hands, previously over Emily's, were placed comfortingly on Emily's shoulders. "They won't budge," she explained. "Believe me, I tried every day for the first week before you got here."

Wiping her wet face with the back of her hand, Emily felt her knees going weak and got down on the floor. Hanna followed on her knees. "Why did you stop?" Emily sniffled.

Smiling slightly, Hanna reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Emily's ear. "I met someone who seemed so strong and _normal_ , that I felt like I didn't need to attempt a break out every night to feel better about being here. Seeing you be treated here for something so normal and unchangeable, and how you go in with your head up and pride intact… I realized that if I want to get out, I have to be more like you. Trick them into thinking you're getting better, the sooner I'll be out of here."

As Hanna encased Emily in a hug, she murmured in her ear, "And if anyone tries to do anything to screw with your head, I will karate chop them in the face."

Though what Hanna had learned from Emily was not right in her case, Emily squeezed Hanna's shoulders and smiled anyway. "I think we both will."

Hanna pulled away and grinned back. "And it'll be fun."


	9. Chapter 9: Aria

**Chapter 9: Aria**

"A week before I turned fifteen, Mona and I decided to celebrate and smuggled in some fireworks from this sketchy teenager who'd just finished a psych evaluation and was only going to be there another week. But we never got to use them because the night before my birthday, I woke up—it always feels like sleepwalking, but I know by now that it's just my other personality waking up—and somehow I was on the roof, and Mona was standing by the ledge. I barely remember much of it; I've blocked it out mostly. There was a knife, supposedly… I think Mona might have handed it to me for some reason. So I spent my birthday being interrogated by the staff. They believed, since the girl hadn't died and only—very luckily—had some scrapes and a couple fractures, the police didn't have to get involved."

"Who was the girl?"

"Huh… I don't remember."

It was honesty hour again with Ezra Fitz, something Aria was finding a lot of relief in. "Then Jenna was assigned as my new roommate, and she was cool. We didn't really connect, though. She wasn't very social, and mostly stayed in the room. But then…" Aria chewed her lip, debated over how much to reveal until she remembered she didn't really have much to lose, and her identity was anonymous anyway. "I didn't think my other half was that violent, but I remember hearing this ear-splitting explosion followed by a pained scream, and suddenly I was holding Jenna. The fireworks we'd hid for my birthday, that we were going to sneak out to the gardens and let loose into the sky for fun and recklessness… Somehow they were in my hands, and I'd sent one right at Jenna's face. Our room almost burned down. I don't know why they didn't take me up to the fourth floor with Mona… Maybe because I'd been there for so long and had never done anything so severe, they had hope in me. And I haven't done anything that terrible since."

"Are you sure it was you?"

Aria shrugged without a tiny bit of apprehension. "Who else could it be? No one else was around." She took the moment of pause to continue with her roommate stories. "After Jenna, I wasn't allowed to have a roommate for one year so that they could watch me in case I really was breaking down into a dangerous person. This summer, someone finally checked in. Alison…" She squinted her eyes and stared in concentration at the table. Something tickled at the back of her brain. Fresh green leaves sprouting on dirt-brown trees shielded by scratchy bark. Suddenly the colors changed to a beige, like sidewalk cement. A shot of pain up her arm as her wrist made a deafening _crack_ sound. She shook her head and the color was now blue, the grayish-blue of Ezra's eyes. She tapped her fingernails on the table and pretended she didn't just have some random playback in front of her. "She said she was there because she had a mental breakdown. But I knew the real reason."

It was strange when Ezra set down his pen. Rather than take more notes, it seemed like all he wanted to do was intently listen. "What was it?"

Again, Aria shrugged her shoulders, this time in doubt. "She brought these diaries with her. One day she left one open on her desk, and I was just dying to peek. But a sheet of paper covered the diary. It looked like she was writing to someone frantically about some unplanned pregnancy, and someone wanting to kill her… Anyway, I assumed she was just in hiding from this person. What better place to escape, right, where no one willingly steps inside? But she never showed any symptoms of being pregnant. By the end of the summer, she was still as slim as can be. Now I'm sure I was wrong." She pointed to his trusty pad and paper. "Aren't you going to write that down?"

Ezra turned his attention to his writing tools and started packing them away. "It's not relevant," he simply explained. He would have added "to your disease," but he was weary in saying that to anyone, even if they accepted it.

Her hand shot out and clasped around his wrist. "Wait." She had to stand up and lean across because of her short stature to reach him. "Because I've been telling you so much… Can you do me a favor?"

Ezra gulped nervously as a mischievous glint of a smile twitched at the corners of her lips. "Well, as long as it's not…illegal."

"It's not!" She clapped her hands together in excitement, and her eyes were watering from the rush of mixed emotions that filled her the second he agreed. "I'm eighteen and no longer need a parent to sign me out of here… And I'm allowed to go out… I just need a willing adult, and I've never had that, so…" The way she acted was like she was asking him to be her date to the school dance. "Can you take me out? As an acquaintance, as a friend?"

"Okay…," Ezra answered apprehensively. Then it dawned on him that this girl hadn't left the gates of Radley in maybe ten years. Maybe her parents took her out a few times in the beginning, but according to Aria's story, they abandoned her early on. "Where would you want to go?"

Ideas overflowed in Aria's brain. The library, the playground, the froyo shop, the lake—all the places she'd frequented as a kid. Or maybe someplace new, like Noel Khan's cabin. When Alison was her roommate, she'd told her the intense stories of the parties at the Khans'. It was the last Friday of August, and as far as Aria knew, the end-of-the-month tradition hadn't ended. That would make her feel like a _real_ teenager.

"I have a place in mind," Aria said, "but I would need to look it up. Pick me up after dinner?"

Ezra couldn't believe he was saying yes, but what harm could possibly be done taking Aria out for one night when she hadn't seen anything for so long? "Seven," he added on, and Aria nodded exuberantly and practically ran out of the dayroom.

…

In Aria and Spencer's room, Spencer had discovered Aria's secret rendezvouses with A and skimmed them with curiosity.

 _Where can I meet you? –Aria_

 _In your head. –A_

 _Why do you always wipe my memory? –Aria_

 _Because we're the same and we're not. Different girl, different memory—if I want it to be. –A_

 _Can you please tell me your real name? –Aria_

 _I think you know what it is. It's four letters with a big, capital A. –A_

To Spencer, it seemed like harassment. And how had she not noticed Aria writing these before? She felt a little queasy thinking of the unknown side of Aria coming out when Spencer was sound asleep. What if that person hated her, or was possessive of Aria and wanted anyone close to her to be gone?

"Hey, Spence!" Aria chirped as she skipped into the room and straight to her closet. Her head was so up in the clouds, she didn't notice what Spencer was doing. "Guess what?" She held a black-and-white patterned dress and laid it out on her bed along with a worn pair of black flats. She wished she had heels, but those weren't allowed in Radley. "I'm going out tonight!"

"Really?" The surprise in Spencer's voice was more prevalent than she wanted it to be. "Who's taking you?"

A blush crept up her cheeks. "Just a friend. He owes me some favors."

"Okay…" Spencer was uncertain if there was anything else to say. "Congratulations, you're finally going out into the real world"? That was true, but harsh, and Spencer wasn't bluntly honest. "Have fun."

"Thanks!" Aria chimed, and floated on her cloud of bliss to her group therapy session.

…

Hanna was debating between peach pink and baby blue nail polish when a shadow appeared in her open doorway and knocked politely. Glancing up from her headache-inducing decision, Hanna saw it was Aria and her heart unintentionally pounded faster.

"Can I come in?" Aria asked, and Hanna, always in for the sass but not always for the rude, nodded with no verbal acknowledgement. To say the situation was tensed with awkwardness was an understatement. "I know you don't really like me or know me, but Spencer told me you love makeup, so…" Hanna could sense where this was going. "I have no idea how to use it. Can you help me?"

Of course, Hanna couldn't turn down a makeup challenge even if it was for her worst enemy. Fingers twitching in anticipation, she pulled out a box from under her bed. Its contents consisted of eyeshadow, mascara, blush, brushes, and eyeliner: the basics. "Sit here." She pointed to the ground next to her without much of a smile on her face.

As Aria bent to the floor, Hanna swirled a brush in a deep purple palette. "Purple is your color. It brings out the green in your eyes," she explained swiftly, then ordered Aria to shut her left eye.

By the time she was done, she considered her work a masterpiece. From dreary prison face to smoking hot, smoky-eyed goddess. Hanna even found the strength to push past her prejudiced judgment and smile. "This guy friend of yours is going to beg to be more than your friend tonight."

Aria snickered and rolled her eyes. "Thanks, Hanna," she said while getting up. "I'll tell you how it goes."

Like that, cold strangers transformed into budding friends.

…

"This is so exciting!" Aria squealed as she took her first step in eight years out of the Radley gates and followed Ezra energetically to his car. "And the nurse didn't even hash me out on the makeup! Double score!"

Ezra considered himself Aria's chauffeur for the night as they strapped their seatbelts. Wherever she wanted to go, he would trail behind and act invisible, unless he was needed. "Where to?"

The cellular device Aria borrowed from Ezra boggled her mind. "Um…" She tapped a square button marked "Maps." "Okay… Do I put the address in here…?" Based on her gut, she tapped the top bar, and a digital keyboard slid out from the bottom. It was crazy that she was using her finger instead of a mouse and a computer. How technology had advanced since she was a young student in Rosewood. She'd gotten the address from Alison, who'd written it down for her before she left. "Here," she said, and handed it back to Ezra.

They were silent on the ride, but surprisingly it wasn't uncomfortable. Trees flashed by and Aria almost had her nose pressed against the glass of the window. "When are we going to get to civilization?" she whined.

"In about five minutes." Ezra glanced at Aria and wasn't surprised. After all, deep down inside, she was still eight years old. Radley may have forced her to grow up, and there was no stopping aging, but her normal life ended when she was very young—and she'd missed out on a lot because of it.

The Aria he was seeing now was an innocent spirit untainted by an illness she couldn't control, free like a bird. Young at heart again. Rejuvenated after years of mental and physical confinement—and just from one night out.

When they reached the location, Ezra's stomach filled with butterflies. "Aria…" Meanwhile, Aria bounced up and down in her seat at the crowds of people holding red solo cups with music blaring from inside the cabin. "How did you know about this place?"

The amount of energy she contained was enough to make Ezra nervous over Aria kicking open his car door. One word: "Alison." Then she flung herself out and, her curiosity and excitement overpowering her anxiety and fear, approached the man guarding the entrance.

Ezra caught up and immediately wondered if he should just wait in the car. After all, all of these people looked like they were 20 or under, and Ezra was 24—young, yet old. But he needed to supervise Aria. At a place like this, dolled up like she was (really, though, that makeup was astounding), she could easily get in a threatening situation as the booze concentration increased and pumped through everyone's veins.

"Aria, wait up!" he called after the guy stamped their inner wrists. "Let me stay close to you."

"Okay, Dad," she joked and slowed down. "I think I know how to take care of myself."

"No. You don't." An offended wrinkled creased in Aria's eyebrow, and he needed to prove it to her somehow. "Okay… When someone offers you a drink, what do you do?"

"Thank them and take it," she replied honestly, confirming Ezra's point.

"No. You don't take it. You get your own drinks always, and never leave it unattended."

Innocently, Aria cocked her head and asked, "But why?"

They began to merge into the partiers. "Because it could be laced with some drug." Sighing, he gently took hold of her elbow to stop her from moving farther into the beast. "Just let me keep an eye on you."

Nodding her head, Aria stepped into the cabin and, as soon as she was slightly separated from Ezra, was surrounded by three guys, all simultaneously wanting to offer her a drink. "No, thank you," she denied politely, then listened in wonder as they threw compliments at her and asked her basic questions about herself. So this was mingling.

From the sidelines like a hawk, Ezra watched Aria and didn't have time to pull her out of the circle of boys surrounding her before one draped an arm over her back and down to her upper thigh. The unwelcome contact caused Aria to jump and break the circle. The boys laughed and said, "What's wrong? Did you not like that?"

Confused over what was going on, Aria did the only thing she did know: she reached out her arms and pushed the one who'd touched her. He slammed into a wall, and soon Ezra was by her side after pushing through tight packs of grinding dancers. "Crazy bitch!" the guy yelled at her as his drink stained his shirt and he rubbed his head, a furious scowl on his face.

The other guys held their hands up in defeat once Ezra entered the picture, and Aria was pulled away. "There are some things you hash out verbally," he explained to her as she fumed, "before you take the extreme."

"That _was_ extreme." She was so angry, tears were falling down her cheeks. Or maybe it wasn't anger—maybe it was fear. "Is that what every guy does when he's interested in a girl? He feels her up first?"

"No," he clarified, "but at these kinds of settings, where everyone's intoxicated, most likely yes."

Aria sucked her lips in and shook her head in raging disappointment. This was not at all how she remembered the outside world—a part of her might have believed that gropey boys were just a myth. Just look at Ezra. He didn't seem like the type of man to touch anyone inappropriately if they didn't want to be.

But then again, not every guy was Ezra—and what did she really know about Ezra anyway, besides his past with his brother? He was just an interviewer, after all. They weren't drinking coffee and splitting a cronut in an attempt to be friends. Yet, she sensed he was a good guy.

"Want to get out of here?" he asked her in response to her strained expression.

"Okay." She caved in, giving up on her fantasy. "Let me just apologize to that guy."

Ezra wanted to hold her back and tell her he might not be in the mood, but she'd blended into the crowd before he could have a say. Suddenly he was anxious, and searched the tops of heads for hers. Where the heck did she go?

A scream paused the entire party as people stopped dancing in confusion and others headed into the house in curiosity. Forcefully Ezra pushed through, not caring how many people swore at him for doing so.

It appeared as though Aria had found the guy at the top of the stairs and, by the fact he was unconscious at the bottom, shoved him again. However, the fear and confusion reflected in her eyes was not the same look she had the first time she physically hurt him. It appeared, to Ezra, like it could have been the work of her other self.

As Ezra rushed up the stairs to meet her, the guys' friends all talked at once. "She's insane!" one exclaimed as the other blurted, "We were just chilling when she came out of nowhere and kept screaming nonsense, and before we knew it she just shoved him!"

Ezra apologized for Aria and grabbed her hand, taking her out of that place before the police arrived and before the shock wore off and everyone started making cruel comments to her, ignorant of her residence. "Are you okay?" he asked her as they quickly got in the car.

"No!" she sobbed. "It was Mona—she sneaks out of Radley all the time and she must have followed us here. She wanted revenge for breaking off our friendship, so she pushed that guy and made me look like I did it."

"And the friends—"

"They weren't looking when Mona pushed him. She disappeared so fast, by the time they turned around, all they saw was me at the top of the stairs."

"Were you…you?"

Rather than talk anymore, she just nodded her head weakly.

When Ezra dropped her off at Radley, he was tempted to not leave her alone. "Do you want me to stay for a few minutes before you go to bed?"

Sniffling, Aria wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "No, that's okay. Visiting hours are over anyway. But thank you." Before either was aware of it, Aria stood up on her toes and kissed his cheek, but she reacted like nothing had happened. "It might have been a bust, but next time…if there is a next time…we'll go somewhere less rowdy."

Ezra was speechless.

"See you next week." She waved before turning around and returning to that dreary place she called her home.

As she wrote to A that night, she brainstormed a way she could word a question without A twisting it into something vague and cryptic. All she really wanted was straight answers, but A wasn't giving her that.

"Aria."

Aria whipped around, the hair she attempted to sculpt into loose waves while it was damp falling behind her back. There stood Mona, her body outlined by the intense light of the hallway.

Immediately Aria's blood pressure and temperature rose until she felt herself boiling and thumping. "What the hell, Mona?" she yelled in indescribable rage. "You've done only one stupid thing in your life, but I never expected you to slip up twice."

Mona took a single step inside so that she was in the room and not the doorway. "I'm sorry, Aria, but I can't let you leave here without me."

"Leave here, as in—"

"Radley." The calm, sane glow of Mona's dark eyes under the fluorescent lighting made her seem normal and not twisted in the head. She took a few steps closer. "The more you think you can get better, the sooner you'll be out of here, and I'll be alone."

Aria stood up, still processing exactly what Mona was saying. "Are you crazy, Mona? You want to keep me in this place the rest of my life?"

The indifferent expression on Mona's face mutated into something redder, darker, and scarier. "We made a _promise_ ," she emphasized, threateningly approaching Aria. "The only way we leave is if we leave together."

Aria spun around and stared at the sheet in front of her, a couple tears wetting the paper. She was terrified of what would happen if she didn't listen to Mona—breaking a friendship was one thing, breaking a promise was opening Hell.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway, and when Aria composed herself and was prepared to face Mona, she turned around and saw that she was gone. "Hey, Aria," Spencer greeted her as she entered the room and closed the door. "How did the night go?"

Dumbfounded, Aria could feel herself start shaking at the now unresolved problem between her and Mona—and Mona could hold grudges for years. "Fine," she croaked, and sat back down at her desk, clenching her pencil in her hand.

 _Have you ever wanted to hurt Mona? –Aria_

She wasn't sure why she wrote it, but her anger and fear were pulsating to the point of melting her brain, and she wondered if maybe her second self could take care of that problem.

The next morning the following message was waiting:

 _No. Just you. –A_


	10. Chapter 10: Hanna

**Chapter 10: Hanna**

One entire month passed, and Hanna almost dozed off in therapy wondering why in the world she was still in this psychotic place. That's when she realized: she'd been there for almost _two months_. In that time, she'd seen John, Helen, even Elizabeth, bid goodbye and thanks for "being better now." She watched as their bony arms plumped up and their ribcages disappeared behind their skin every week.

It wasn't fair. She looked like every single one of them now, _after_ they'd been treated. But why didn't anyone believe her?

In fact, Hanna's improvement had been so miniscule in almost two months, Caleb had requested she have more frequent one-on-one therapy sessions. "When was the last time you'd eaten something?" he inquired as the last person filed out. God, she wished she was able to leave. She wanted to go to lunch and be there when Spencer invited Aria to sit with them. It'd been a rocky few weeks; right when Hanna was opening up to Aria not being so cuckoo, Spencer had put up a fence with the whole investigation into Alison's disappearance and Aria's supposed involvement in it. But now, Spencer was calmed down, doubting Aria's alleged threatening nature. She deserved, like all of them, to make it out of here while her brain was still attached. How Aria had survived ten years at Radley, Hanna had no idea.

"Yesterday, I think?" she replied honestly. It was difficult to lie to Caleb's concerned face. She hadn't told him yet, but he was helping her a lot, emotionally. But it must be frustrating for someone to tell you that yet not physically see their problems go away. "I had an apple for breakfast."

"And that's it?"

She glanced down at her lap, embarrassed. When'd she ever been embarrassed by how much she ate? Last year, she'd bragged about eating twelve almonds a day and not feeling a bit hungry. Boys and girls of all ages would drop their jaws to the ground when she'd reveal that unconventional piece of information. Of course, it was a lie that her stomach wasn't growing like crazy all the time. But it was the truth now. "Yeah."

"You have to eat more than that. Allow your stomach to build a tolerance again. You don't have to eat a full meal in one sitting; in fact, that's highly _not_ recommended. You know, the victims of the Holocaust, they were given Jell-O—"

Hanna tugged at a loose strand on her robe. It didn't take her long to stop dressing up; this place wasn't worth her time. "I don't want to," she blurted out, stopping him, "…eat anything."

"Hanna, soon enough, you're not going to have a choice. I don't want to scare you, but you are, as of recently, on the brink of life and death. You can, and will, be hospitalized if you don't start gaining some weight and eating again." Hanna kept her gaze focused on her lap. "Your mother is paying for you to be here so you can survive this… And I know you're strong enough to push through and feel _better_ —"

"I feel fine!" Hanna shouted, controlling the hysteria bubbling up inside her. A wave of dizziness passed through her, and she put a hand on the back of the sturdy chair. "And I'm so close to reaching the weight I've strived for since Hefty Hanna became my name."

Despite her burning desire to make it out of Radley, Hanna still wasn't speaking much in therapy. The most she'd say was vague, like "I felt like my body wasn't good enough," a typical statement to dodge not saying anything at all. For everyone there, though, there was a bigger pressuring instigator that made them sink into obsessing over their body weight: anxiety or depression, self-esteem, grades, alcoholic parent, peer pressure, even a girl whose dance teacher bullied her into losing more weight in order to become the "impeccable" ballerina figure.

But Hanna didn't want to share Hefty Hanna with the group.

As she stormed out of the room, Caleb didn't attempt to hold her back. It was more than difficult to help people like Hanna—people deep in their own beliefs, to the point they were blinded by any other possibility. But she had to understand that being at Radley didn't suddenly protect her from her choices. Caleb had seen statistics for the patients here; losing a patient to an eating disorder wasn't nonexistent. But how do you teach someone to see what they can't see? Just because an eating disorder starts as voluntary doesn't mean it can't come to the point of loss of control, like a cancerous tumor.

At the end of the hallway, a reflective glass wall halted Hanna in her raging tracks. To those who were rash and told Hanna what they saw, her ribcage was poking out. But to Hanna, she pinched her arms and there was fat; when she slapped it, it swung back and forth. Squeezing her thighs, there was the jelly-like cellulite that left unwanted indents in her skin because there was more fat under it that also jiggled. As for her torso, she pinched the pouch of fat in her lower stomach.

It was everywhere, yet nowhere to the eyes of outsiders. Angry, frustrated tears brimmed at her reddening eyes. Those people _had_ to be delusional. Hefty Hanna was still hanging around, and she made her stomach jiggle when she walked.

Whipping back around on her heels, Hanna stormed to the room and confronted Caleb, furious sparks glistening in her ice-blue eyes. "I don't know if you know this, but I was on the opposite end of the spectrum for eating disorders when I was nine years old. I was able to eat five pies in one sitting—and I wanted to. My parents would argue, I'd grab half of the sheet cake in the fridge. I'd get a C-minus on a report I worked my ass off on, I'd eat _two_ entire packs of pudding cups. You have no right to judge me and think I'm not aware of what I'm doing, _because I am_." A wet stream ran down her cheek, and she wiped at it angrily. The window on the opposite end reflected exactly what she didn't want to see: chubby, jiggly, unattractive, disgusting Hefty Hanna. "It wasn't enough that I wanted to slowly kill my body with fat and sugar to feel better. But classmates are cruel. This bully named Alison gave me this nickname: Hefty Hanna. And you think I just slipped into vomiting after every meal because of some social pressures? All the fault was mine. _I_ stuck the toothbrush down my throat, _I_ ran the sink and put my head down the toilet as I lied to my mom about taking a shower, _I_ started lying to my mom about eating dinner earlier when I hadn't eaten it at all. I would just throw it in the trash." Hanna, whose arms were crossed and pressed firmly against her chest, shrugged her shoulders. "How could anyone here blame their problems on anything or anyone but themselves?"

It was an awkward situation to put Caleb in, but he'd been trained on emotional outbursts like this. Many assumed he was too attached to a computer to come close to comprehending human emotions—yet another reason why he felt like he should volunteer here in the first place. During the one-way argument, he'd slipped his hands into his pockets and just listened. Now he gestured to the chairs and he sat down while Hanna hesitated then plopped down, huffing. "First of all, Hanna—I never made any of those assumptions about you. That's not my place," he commenced. The most difficult part of this kind of work was attempting not to unintentionally offend the patient. "But I'm glad." Hanna's eyes darted away from his. "That you have shared this with me, because now, I do understand. And we can work around this and your health will improve…"

Hanna scoffed and stood up, shaking her head. "That's all anyone cares about here—getting better. Well, you know what? It's not always about getting better. Sometimes it's just about talking and that's it." With that, she raced out of the room, this time not returning. She didn't want to admit it, but Caleb was right about one thing: just confessing all of that to him felt a step closer to getting out of this place.

However, it hurt her that he cared so much about everyone's wellbeing and all she cared about was leaving, whether it be because she tricked the doctors or not. He was here voluntarily—and she'd been bashing him around from the beginning. He had the option to leave here; her rebellious, unwelcome tactics hadn't scared him off. If he had hope for her…

Hanna shook off her conflicting thoughts and strode calmly into the cafeteria. Hope bred eternal misery, after all. Caleb could try to help all he wanted, but Hanna might forever be resilient in her belief that everything was already fine.

As she squeezed in next to Emily, Spencer and Emily were eating their meals silently. Raising an eyebrow, Hanna turned around and saw Aria sitting, alone, like always. For the first time Hanna felt guilt for shutting out Aria—how much did it hurt to get frozen off by your own roommate for two months? And why, after warming up to them, were they still shutting you out at the most miserable and agonizing time of the day? "Well, Spence?" Hanna grinned. "Are you going to do it or shall I?"

"I don't know, guys…," Emily hesitated. "I know we talked about it, but if she really did hurt Alison…"

"Screw Alison," Hanna barked defiantly. She could picture that stuck-up blonde devil now, sneering and emphasizing every syllable of "Hefty Hanna." "She was cruel to everyone. Or did you forget how much she bashed around Aria, and us?"

Spencer nodded her head and stood up, striding over to the almost empty table. Intrigued, Hanna watched, and was relieved that no punches were thrown. It didn't even take a minute for Aria to willingly join them and sit across from Hanna.

"So, Rosewood, huh?" Hanna blurted. It was what she did during meal times: blabber like the world was ending. It's not like she had food to play with in case of a loss of conversation. "Terrible place, yet we all want to go back."

"I thought it was nice," Aria piped up, crunching into a celery stick with peanut butter. "Not the people, but the town. There was this tree—"

"On the elementary school playground?" Hanna interrupted, clapping her hands excitedly. "That tree was so beautiful! It would grow these gorgeous white blossoms in the spring… Too bad they cut it down to renovate the football field."

Aria's smile fell. "Oh…" Once Hanna had recognized what she was talking about, Aria was ecstatic that maybe they had more in common than she'd originally thought. But these girls had lived through Rosewood for a decade more than she had; who knew how much Rosewood had changed.

And that tree was her safe haven, back when she was a third grader. That just proved that all good things came to an end.

"Ugh, remember the Kissing Rock?" Emily chimed in, making a gagging noise and rolling her eyes.

"The Kissing Rock?" Aria inquired innocently.

"Yeah, it was this rock that couples would go to to make out," Spencer explained. "But with the high schoolers going there… It was kind of a gross place, really."

"And it's…a rock?"

"Yeah! It was far enough in the woods to not be heard, but close enough to the lake so you weren't completely lost. Oh, remember Noel's summer party, when Bridget got drunk and skinny-dipped in front of _everyone_?"

"That was so embarrassing!" Emily laughed. "For her, I mean. But I felt embarrassed for her."

"Really? I felt more embarrassed for that game of strip poker that ended in that one guy being butt naked. Bridget had a choice; it seemed like he didn't," Spencer added.

As Hanna, Emily, and Spencer chatted away about their high school experience in Rosewood, Aria felt herself getting farther away even though she was still. Being the new friend in a group wasn't fun when you were the outsider to begin with. She poked at her spaghetti and pretended to disappear.

Before Hanna could comprehend what she was doing, she pointed at Aria's tray and asked, "Are you going to eat that?"

Spencer, Emily, and Aria watched in amazement as Hanna dug a fork into it, spun it around, and swallowed one bite. Right after, she put the fork down and thanked Aria. But it was unlike Hanna to touch any carb that wasn't a fruit or vegetable, when she'd allow herself to nibble on something.

Aria scooted the tray closer to Hanna. "Would you like more…?"

"No, thanks." Hanna waved it away. It was odd, having that tomato and herb taste in her mouth. She didn't know how to feel about it, but a part of her was already fighting over how she allowed herself to consume a well-known carb overload.

"I was just hungry," she admitted, and no one said anything. "But not anymore."


	11. Chapter 11: Spencer

**Chapter 11: Spencer**

The ear-pounding thump of a textbook smacking the floor caused Spencer to jump out of her skin. "Aria!" she berated when she saw her chemistry textbook lying open on the ground. "What was that for?"

For a couple weeks now, Spencer and Aria had conspired over a time set aside for studying, mostly so Aria and Spencer could both enjoy knowledge at the same time rather whenever they wanted to. (Spencer couldn't focus when Aria blared her music in her ears while painting long, straight lines of mixed colors, then whining to Spencer over how she wished she could paint her fingernails instead of reminding herself how terrible she was at crafts.)

Today seemed like a frustration for Aria, which was more common than Aria preferred to admit. Her education after third grade was crappy here. Math and science were like blurry images she was trying to clear up, but her brain was limited in the knowledge and could only unclear it to an extent. But this was the first time she ever threw a book in pitiful annoyance.

"What the hell," she growled, "is a stupid orbital? No, cross that—what the hell is a stupid _electron_?"

Closing her history textbook, Spencer got off her bed and picked up the chemistry book. "Do you want an explanation or are you just complaining?"

Aria chewed her bottom lip angrily, humiliated that she had to ask for help in her limited intelligence. Admitting to Spencer that she wanted an explanation just proved how obtuse she felt every day with Spencer as a roommate. Ignorance wasn't bliss all the time, though Aria had read up on all the educational books Radley had to offer.

But even if her intelligence expanded, it wouldn't help her from leaving Radley. "You need to stop bothering me about that, Spence," she had explained at the wrap-up of their study session time the other day. "That's your goal, and Hanna's, and Emily's—not mine. I know I belong here; if I accept that, why let it bother you?"

 _Because you_ don't _belong here_ , Spencer had wanted to say. _Because you_ can _get better_. _I know it._

Very few people were aware of Melissa Hastings' mental illness. After all, who would suspect anything off about the woman who got straight A-pluses in every AP and honors class, ran the student council, participated in varsity sports, and was crowned prom queen? But when Melissa was little, she would act out and harass Spencer, not even stopping when Spencer cried her name. The Hastings' parents avoided sending their kids to hospitals except for extreme emergencies—oh, how times have changed—and besides, for Melissa, who was having a difficult time with her memory, they were going to try a psychiatrist first. She was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, prescribed medication, given intensive therapy, and she never acted out of character again—she returned to always being sweet, hardworking Melissa. To this day she kept up with her medication and had come to peace with herself and what her brain was capable of. It was Melissa's proof that mentally ill people were no different than any other person that convinced Spencer that anyone was able to heal.

Why couldn't Aria?

"Let me explain," Spencer suggested so that Aria didn't have to embarrass herself. She flipped through the pages and found a diagram of an oxygen atom. "Atoms are the building blocks of everything in the universe. Everything is made up of atoms, which are the smallest units of elements. Each atom is made up of three particles: protons, electrons, and neutrons. Electrons are negatively charged and 'float,' for lack of a better word, around the center of the atom, which is compromised of protons and neutrons. Orbitals are where electrons are most likely to be found around the nucleus. Now, getting into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—"

"Whoa, Spence," Aria stopped her, putting a hand up. "Slow down."

"Sorry," Spencer panted. She could feel her adrenaline pumping from the excitement that came with teaching people all about the world—which was only worsened by her withdrawal symptoms. It was hard to believe that doctors were still weaning her off Adderall; she hadn't accepted how addicted she was until that realization. Sitting down next to Aria, she propped the textbook on her knees. "Here. Let's start from the very beginning."

There was one thing Aria was right about: she wasn't ready to leave Radley. But she was wrong about saying that was because she belonged there. No, she wasn't prepared to face the suburban American world just yet—not until her education was caught up to where she was supposed to be.

And that was something Spencer could help with.

Later that day, at her group therapy session, Spencer, who usually kept to herself like Hanna, raised her hand to say something. Every addict in the room—some slightly glistening from withdrawal, others looking exhausted, and others appearing just normal—shifted their eyes to her, but she didn't squirm. It was intimidating, to say the least, but with Aria on her way to recovery, Spencer could see herself really attempting to get out now. "My parents wanted me to take all of the AP classes the school offered, which included my own free time," she began to explain. "Last year especially, I knew I had reached the limit, but I couldn't admit that to them or myself. I needed a boost, something to trick my body into thinking it could do more than it naturally could." She bit her lip and felt the overwhelming urge to shut up, but the story was out there; she couldn't stop now. "My school is known for its competitive nature, so it wasn't hard to find someone with Adderall… I thought I would hate it, that it would give me a headache or just make me feel weird, but no… It felt _amazing_. It made me feel like all of this pressure my parents boxed me into was capable. But now I've come to realize that it controlled me…and that it wasn't _truly_ me…"

When Spencer heard that "Officer Hot Cop" was there that day, she went on a scavenger hunt to find him. He was found chatting to a nurse, either about Aria or Nurse Fran's new hair, one of the two. "Officer Toby!" she greeted innocently with a taut smile on her face combined with glinting eyes of innuendo. "How's Rosewood been?"

Nurse Fran didn't suspect a thing as their conversation wrapped up and Spencer gestured towards a hallway. "Walk with me?"

"That's bold of you," Toby said as they strolled nonchalantly to the room they've met up in before. "I'm not really in the mood to be questioned about my relationship with a patient here."

"And you won't," Spencer reassured him, her thumping heart slowing down at the _click_ of the door opening under her fingertips. "You just have to answer my questions."

Uncomfortable, Toby's lips pursed. "I don't know if I can answer anything."

"Then what can you tell me?"

Sighing, Toby sat in front of the table, and Spencer followed, plopping down across from him. "There's not much to say. Alison is still missing, and there's barely any leads or evidence."

"And Aria?" Spencer inquired. "Is she still a suspect in all of this?"

Toby squirmed, but he knew his morals would get in the way of him spilling too much. "She doesn't have an alibi, and someone snuck out of Radley that night…"

Lounging back, Spencer crossed her arms. "Is this because of her illness?"

"Spencer—"

"It is!" Spencer's anger began to boil, and she slammed a fist on the table. "Having a mental illness doesn't make you any more of a suspect than anyone else. Especially for such a kind person like Aria. She can't even handle killing a spider. Trust me, I've seen it."

"It's not just that," Toby calmly tried to explain. "She has a history with Alison."

Here it was: the information the police were able to uncover from Aria's childhood. "You mean Alison and Aria's relationship as kids?" Silent, Toby nodded. "That was the past, though. If Aria wanted to hurt Alison so badly, then why didn't she do it when Ali was her roommate?" As Toby stood up, mumbling that he shouldn't talk about this anymore, Spencer could feel her desperation surfacing. "And also, if you care to know, a lot of people had a grudge with Alison. Try the entire school."

But Toby didn't seem like he was going to stop. "Wait." He halted, much to Spencer's relief. "Can I ask you one more thing?"

Sighing, Toby couldn't help but cave; this woman was exhausting. "Go ahead."

"When will she be questioned?"

For such a simple question, it had quite an unclear answer. "Soon," Toby said vaguely, uncertain of it, but wanting to get out of here. "First we have to know if Alison ran away or—"

"And what if Alison is found dead? What then?"

Toby's lips didn't move. A dreadful sweat clumped around Spencer's hairline, and she stood up on shaky knees. "Listen to me, Toby, this is a friend you're talking about. Please, you have to tell me the truth."

Licking his cracked lips, Toby avoided Spencer's gaze and instead stared down at his glistening police badge. "If there's enough evidence to convict her… It could mean a lifetime sentence in federal prison."

A shiver jostled down Spencer's spine. "Even someone who's sick?" she whispered numbly. She was always under the impression that those who were ill, physically or mentally, were given _some_ special treatment in prison, specifically something to help them heal first. Picturing Aria in an orange jumpsuit, her darker half taking control of her to protect herself until she morphed completely into her worst nightmare…

"You're the one who accused us of treating Aria differently because of her illness. Isn't it only fair that all people are punished equally for the same crime?"

The corner of Spencer's mouth twitched. "I think if you pick up a history book, you'll find that statement utterly idealistic."

When Toby reached for the door handle, Spencer darted over to him and stopped him one last time. "One last thing," she said, grasping the handle tightly. "About Aria… You can't just leave me questioning people I trust, especially if you know something. So I'm wondering if I can have your word to help me solve this… Please?"

The eager glint shimmering off Spencer's eyes softened Toby's heart. It was familiar to him: after his mother passed away in this exact place, he would have done anything to piece the tragic, severely shattered shards together. It was like looking at a former reflection of himself. "Fine," he caved. "But do you have any ideas?"

Spencer's once pleading face morphed into a twisted smile. "I think I do."

Borrowing Toby's notepad, Spencer wrote down one word: Mona. "If we take into consideration what Aria said, then Mona is very easily able to sneak out of Radley. _And_ it's incredibly suspicious that she was not in the record of the roof incident."

"But why would Mona want to hurt Alison? For all we know, they don't even know each other."

Spencer drew an arrow under Mona's name and scribbled "File." "So we get her file," she devised. "And we can see if she's ever brought up Alison's name." With that, she wrote down Alison's name in capital letters and circled it, followed by a question mark.

While Spencer and Aria were studying the next day, their tranquility was disturbed by a knock at the door. "Knock knock!" Hanna exclaimed with a couple bottles of nail polish in her hands. "We're here to join the party!"

Rolling her eyes, Emily trailed behind. "I kept telling her this was a _study_ party, but she didn't believe me."

"So what? We can paint nails while studying," Hanna defended while grabbing tissues to stuff between her toes.

"Not really," Spencer corrected her. "A lot of this is just reading. My parents are behind on giving me my schoolwork, so I'm reading ahead out of boredom."

As Emily sat on the floor, her legs criss-crossed, in front of Hanna, she brushed out her hair with her fingers. Swiping one stroke of the bright liquid on her big toe, Hanna cringed. "That's about the only thing keeping me sane here—skipping school."

"Really?" Emily tucked her tangle-free hair behind her ears. "I kind of miss it. The social part of it, I mean. The swim team, meeting up with friends at lunch…"

An echoing snapping sound of two fingers striking across each other brought their attention to the messy-haired bent over a book. "I'm trying to read, you guys."

"Sorry," Hanna hissed while continuing to paint her toenails a peachy pink.

Despite having her study time interrupted, Aria grinned happily as she watched Hanna decorate herself, Emily whisper gossip about some couple back at Rosewood High, and Spencer intensely poring into her book. It'd been too long since she felt this content. "Can I join?" she finally asked, and Hanna laughed joyfully as she handed Aria the bottle of sky blue nail polish.

Meanwhile, Spencer reread the notes she and Toby had compiled that she'd stuffed in the spine of her textbook. It was very little to go off of, but Spencer was far too into the mystery of her roommate and new friend to go back to ignorant bliss.

Someone had wanted to hurt Alison, and Aria was the prime suspect because of how cruelly Alison bullied her in elementary school. Yet, there was a much less stable patient, Mona, who was known for sneaking out of Radley while Aria had never snuck out alone in her decade there.

Then it clicked, and Spencer lunged for a pen. "Knowledge too much for you, Spence?" Hanna joked while Emily leaned over and playfully slapped her across the shoulder.

How had she not thought of this before? Aria was open enough to Spencer to reveal to her what happened the night Ezra took her out. It was obvious that Mona was a possessive individual—enough to evoke passionate jealousy, perhaps?

Proudly and confidently Spencer jotted her epiphany down:

 _Mona—possessive, clingy, unwilling to let Aria go_

 _Aria's past roommates—Mona, locked up for life-threatening behavior; Jenna, blinded; Alison, missing_

 _Alison—Aria's most recent roommate, past of bullying Aria_

The next words she underlined severely:

 _Alison emotionally abused Aria—Mona seeking revenge?_


	12. Chapter 12: Emily

**Chapter 12: Emily**

When Emily woke up that night, she couldn't feel a thing.

Her back was numb. She turned to look at what was making it feel that way, and there was a surgeon whose face was covered in a mask jabbing a thick needle in her spine. "Why are you doing this?" Emily tried to say, but the sensation in her face weakened, and her jaw slacked. The same surgeon pulled the syringe out like it was a knife lodged deep inside her, then carefully leaned her down on her back.

From head to toe, Emily was paralyzed. It was her worst nightmare, but she couldn't feel her throat to scream.

Rapidly another group of medics stormed in with trays of surgical supplies, one including an electric saw-like tool. "Huh?" Emily was capable of murmuring, and she used up the last of her bodily sensation to twitch her fingers and toes and flop her neck a centimeter. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head to find the door the doctors came through, but there was nothing—no walls, no door, no escape. Instead there was pitch darkness where the barriers of a room should have been.

"No!" Emily _wanted_ to scream—scream bloody murder, like every captured teenage girl in horror movie history. But rather than sensing her terror and denial, the surgeons gathered around her, each with a sharp object in their hands, and stared down at her with no eyes. In Emily's mind, her face was distorting into discomfort and fear, but in reality all she was was a slack, lifeless slab of flesh on a chilling metal surface.

The whirring of a saw, a terror-provoking sound that brought a sweeping winter over Emily's body and pulled her stomach down to Hell, had Emily attempt one last time, with all her remaining strength, to produce a scream, but nothing came from her lips. One surgeon came in view with the saw in his hand, and Emily wondered if he was smiling at that moment as he brought a dripping piece of cloth closer to Emily's mouth and muttered, "This shouldn't hurt one bit…"

The terror-inducing roar of the saw dimmed and was replaced by a static noise. The saw was swapped by a metal-made tool that crackled every now and then. "Hold still…"

Emily's eyes snapped open before she was able to feel the prickly, paralyzing jolts of electricity flow through her bloodstream. A cold sweat saturated her pillow as she reached her hand behind her head to wipe the beads off her hairline. It was just a nightmare, she attempted to pacify her trembling body. Just a dream.

Peeking over at Hanna, green patches spread on Emily's skin like the Wicked Witch's as Emily saw how peacefully and undisturbedly Hanna slept. It was like she had no fear of death, no impending doom from the thoughts of her organs shutting down one by one until it was no longer able to wake her up in the morning. Emily wasn't even close to being near the brink of pearly gates—or Hades' Underworld, if her fate truly was sealed with her sexuality—yet she was the one with sleepless nights.

In a weak attempt to relax, Emily leaned her head back onto her pillow and focused on loosening every single tightened muscle. Toes, back, neck—the process soothed her, distracted her from the nightmare of her brain being lobbed out, but not before being fried.

When the morning came, Emily poked at her breakfast and feared her therapy session that day. The psychiatrist always asked her about her dreams, and Emily was usually honest—and other times, she made up dreams about drawing naked girls (which earned her a triple dose of pills) before doing the smart thing and mentioning her shame. After all, she wasn't going anywhere, even if she vomited at the idea of kissing a woman.

"What's wrong, Em?" Hanna asked as she picked the skin off an apple, chewing the shredded bits in her mouth before throwing the rest, which consisted of half skin and all flesh, away.

In response, Emily nervously placed a finger in her mouth and bit at its nail. "Nothing, just…the heat made it hard to sleep last night."

"Ugh, talk about a disaster," Hanna groaned and flicked a speck of fingernail polish she'd scraped off. "I've never needed AC more in my life. I was surprised no patient died of heatstroke in the middle of the night.

"Yeah…," Emily mumbled in agreement, and ended up dumping her oatmeal in the wastebasket.

When the dreaded moment arrived and Emily was asked the simple question, "Do you remember your dream last night?" Emily parted her lips, shamefully glanced down at her chewed-up fingers in her lap, and said that yes, she remembered.

"What was it about?"

It was so basic, yet Emily's throat swelled. "Fear," she answered vaguely.

"Fear?"

"Yes. Just plain fear."

"Of what?"

Biting her bottom lip with her front teeth, Emily shrugged. You, she wanted to respond. But all that came out was a clichéd phrase of avoidance: "I don't know."

When the session ended, Emily's palm cradled a note from a doctor on the third floor. Her stomach clenched; Aria had warned her about the third floor. But the note was only asking for a blood test that wouldn't even take a minute. How could it not be legitimate?

To get to the third floor required a nurse's pass that had a prerequisite of forms to sign. Apparently, with a scribble of her signature, Emily was no longer able to sue Radley if she was attacked by a patient. The elevator was like any elevator, except when its doors opened…

…It was like any other hospital. Clean, pristine, taken care of. Much better than the first two floors, which still contained the closed-down, tarnished children's ward. She was expecting Nurse Ratched looming over her, but instead, there was no one around. When Emily took a seat in the waiting room, it was like she was waiting to see her grandfather after his knee surgery.

The normality of it despite its location oddly soothed Emily. She missed being a regular kid with no questionable morals, so she closed her eyes and pictured herself in a doctor's office, getting her blood drawn to check her levels. After all, she had to be fit and healthy to swim as competitively as she did.

Suddenly a hand grabbed her arm and Emily jumped out of the ceiling. "What the—? Aria!" she exclaimed as she stood up, crossing her arms at her chest as her prickled skin fumed. "What are you doing here?"

"Saving you!" Aria yelled in a hushed voice. Her nails dug into Emily's goosebump-y arm, and Emily tugged it back in protest. "Don't ask questions! Just go!"

Before Emily could peep out one more question, she was dragged into the elevator. Aria pressed the button for the first floor furiously, and a sweat was glistening around her hairline. "Are you okay?" Emily's voice cracked; she hadn't noticed her racing heartbeat until now.

Aria's ghost-white face tinted green. "They were going to put you into surgery," she murmured. "Your parents signed off on it."

The sound of the crackling electricity prodded Emily's memory. "W-what…"

"I got this this morning." Aria pulled a crumbled sheet of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it with trembling hands.

 _Third floor, 2pm. Someone's going to leave without a brain… –A_

Emily shook her head in disbelief as the brims of her eyelids watered. "How did they find out?"

Aria shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know." But of course she knew. A loved sneaking out in the middle of the night to snoop around. The elevator dinged and they had to wait a few seconds before the doors creaked open; the silence was heavy and awkward. The two strolled like pale ghosts back to Emily's room.

By the time they reached the door, Emily's lips wobbled and she collapsed against the door frame—pushing it open. "Oh my God!" she gasped as she crashed to the ground and a pain shot up her knee. But she couldn't find the strength to pull herself back up, so she stayed there, on the freezing floor—just sobbing. The area of bone she banged throbbed. It was like when she was eight years old and fell off her bike: at first she was just shocked, then she cried for a solid two minutes as the gravel dug into her sweating palms. But this was so much worse than a fall; this was a drop into a precipice, yet her supposed salvation from an eternity in a burning prison.

"Em…" Aria attempted to console Emily, but her limbs were hesitant over what to do—should she drape her arms around Emily's neck in a hug? Pat her back? Help her up? "At least you're fine now…," she muttered. Words said more than actions in this case.

However, Emily didn't budge. Her sides expanded and contracted erratically with her sobs. A small puddle was pooling on the hard, concrete ground. Aria reached out her hand—

"Oh my God!" Hanna burst in and dropped to Emily's side. "Emily, what's the matter? What happened?" Unlike Aria, who was using her mouth, Hanna moved Emily like a ragdoll into a more comfortable sitting position next to the bed. Her hand held Emily's, her thumb running over her mocha-blended skin. "What happened?"

But Emily still wasn't responding, so Hanna turned her attention to Aria. Her icy blue eyes flooded with concern. "Why is she so upset?"

"Her parents signed off on some procedure…," Aria vaguely explained, and pulled out the note because she was feeling sick and didn't want to talk about it anymore.

"This is disgusting," Hanna murmured, her lips pinched up. "What kind of insane people…" She drifted off and shoved the paper back to Aria. Now she was too upset to talk about it.

Five minutes later, and Emily was quieting, but she was continuously unresponsive. In order to get some fresh air but not seem like a terrible friend, Aria said she was going to get Spencer, and maybe by then Emily would be "better"—if that was ever possible—and consoled.

While Aria was gone, Hanna only draped her arm around Emily's shoulders and didn't say a word.

When Spencer heard the news, she lunged for her nightstand drawer and tugged out a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels. "I was saving these for the right time," she huffed out as they zoomed to Hanna and Emily's room. "That would be now. Em!" Like Hanna, Spencer collapsed on the ground on Emily's other side and hugged her. "It's okay," she comforted her. "You're fine, and safe…"

Once Emily peeled her crusted, swollen eyelids open to acknowledge her friends, she saw Aria standing a few feet away before closing the gap and dropping cross-legged in front of her. Every breath Emily took was labored and spotty. "We've only known each other for a little over a month," she croaked, leaning her head against Spencer's shoulder. "Why does it feel like we've been friends for years?"

No one had an answer…except for Aria. "That's what this place does. It makes a week feel like months." And years feel like centuries.

"And we all have the same goal: to get out of this place," Spencer added, and looked sternly into Emily's red-rimmed, suffering eyes. "We're not leaving anyone behind." Aria adjusted her feet so her circulation wasn't cut off.

Hanna gently draped her hand over Emily's shoulder and squeezed it lightly. "We're the Four Musketeers."

"Charlie's Angels."

"The _Charmed_ sisters—plus one."

Traditionally, all of those allusions were made up of three people. Aria wondered who was the one left out in a second of thought.

After their feel-better laughter died down, the atmosphere soured. Hanna's smile wilted. "But what if we'd never been locked in here?" she inquired, drawing a circle on the ground with her toe. "Would we have ever been friends?"

The four of them glanced at each other, thought of their bonds growing stronger and more durable every day—and, disturbingly, found it very easy to imagine life without each other.

Spencer would still be swallowing pills dry before every cramming session.

Hanna would still be dumping her dinner in the neighbor's trash to prevent her mom from seeing it uneaten in the trash can.

Emily would just be the star athlete with a secret crush on the girl in front of her in English class.

And Aria? Well, Aria would still be here—trapped in her own mind without a friend in the world.


	13. Chapter 13: Aria

**Chapter 13: Aria**

Thursday was a special day. It meant that the only person other than the one with the hopes to extract what was incomprehensible about her illness was visiting: the only person who shared the same blood but hadn't abandoned her in this soul-sucking place.

"Mike," Aria sighed as she encased him in a very much needed hug. "It's been way too long."

"Boarding school has been way too long," Mike replied, and Aria's exuberance and elevated heart rate deflated. "How is that?" she asked, uneasy.

"Terrible," he scoffed. "It's just a bunch of spoiled kids who had nothing better to do but light cars on fire and steal from convenience stores. Ironic, since they can get whatever they want. I'm the only 'poor boy.'"

At the reminder of her family's financial situation, Aria realized that even though her parents no longer visited her, they were still paying for her to be treated. A twitching twinge of hope warmed Aria's chest, and she grabbed Mike's hand. "I don't want to talk about that anymore." The corners of her mouth lit up. "Tell me about what you're studying."

After Mike left, back to boarding school for another three months, Aria slunk back to her room, that growing hope burnt out. Alone again, it seemed. Abandoned by parents and brother. She guessed she looked forward to Ezra's visits, but Ezra wasn't Mike. Ezra was the guy writing down what she said word for word for the world to read, and learn. What he was writing she wasn't sure; she barely gave him any useful information. Shouldn't his interviewing process be completed by now?

Before Aria went to sleep that night, she snuck out Spencer's copy of _Jane Eyre_ and flipped to the dog-earred page. The vivid portrayal of Thornfield caused Aria's spine to convulse, and she sunk deeper into her bed covers. While turning the page, a folded sheet of paper slipped out, and Aria picked it up. For some reason, her fingers were trembling.

Smoothing out the creases, Aria saw the familiar red ink and cursive scrawl:

 _Light, light, go away, because in the dark I come. Nighty night, sleep tight—hopefully I won't bite. –A_

Cheeks inflamed, Aria shredded the note and stuffed the pieces under her mattress; that way she won't even see its remnants in the trash can. It was steadily killing her, this cryptic A. She'd tried to find out more and ended up with nothing but pure, flammable frustration.

Suddenly the chilliness of Thornfield and Mr. Rochester being a jerk for tricking Jane as a gypsy no longer felt appealing, so Aria retired for the night and snapped off her lamp; Spencer still read her physics textbook furiously for a couple more hours.

Usually, Aria didn't dream. But when she did, it was so incredibly lifelike, it wasn't a dream at all. The door handle Aria touched was clammy. The crisp, white nurse's uniform she wore in pristine condition was scratchy against her skin. A badge dangled from her chest, bumping her left breast. The bleep of the ID sensor paused until giving a longer, approving beep.

When she laughed, it was the most euphoric laughter in human history. The cameras peeking at her didn't blast an alarm, as the uniform was enough to trick her position in this place. The outdated iron bars of the gate encasing the asylum numbed Aria's fingers as they curled around the rusting metal surface. She pushed, and the hinge creaked as the turn picked up pace under her grasp. Letting go, she crunched the fresh gravel. Step, step, step—she approached the woods.

Once beneath the cooling effect of the bushy pine trees' reaching branches, Aria's steps turned into a skip, and broke into a run. She kicked the bulky shoes off her soft, un-calloused feet and let the leaves, grass, and broken wood scratch up her ankles. The dark led her nowhere, but she knew she was going somewhere.

This was the true definition of freedom.

The moonlight barely penetrated the pine needle roof, and Aria paused, letting her heart and lungs catch up to her inner child. Her fingers pushed fabric to bare her shoulders, her chest, her hips, her legs, until there was only a white pile glimmering on the cold dirt, and a pair of dirtied feet scampering away.

This was what Artemis must have felt like, in the tranquil kingdom of this forest. No waiting bottle of pills or trained experts in white coats, pens poised and eyes prodding. It was just Aria and the calm silence between the windless paths of the trees.

Eventually child-like Aria needed to break, and she curled up on a bed of crisp leaves and freshly dropped pine needles. _Don't go_ , she cried to herself in this dream state. _I don't want to go back_.

Yet the image drifted without her permission, the lasting image in the photographic part of her memory that of the starlight seeping through the crevices of the protective layer above her.

…

But when Aria awoke in the morning, the dream was revealed as a nightmare.

Naked, alone, and bleeding, Aria sat up on her pile of what she dreamt were soft, recently deceased leaves but were actually itchy, shriveled crisps. The tiny scratches that were supposed to go up her legs and down her arms were riddled with larger gashes, probably from a splintered branch. Her blood soaked the soil. What had she done to herself?

A whooshing honk drifted to her ear from somewhere not too far. As she stood on clanking knees, she crossed her streaked arms at her chest and padded over the moist ground, following the path of the sound.

She wasn't sure which body part to cover. What made her more vulnerable? What did she not want others to see? These questions were supposed to matter to normal people, but to Aria she covered with her limbs only to keep herself warm and possibly from slipping into shock. Even coming upon the road made her no more aware of her nudity; instead, she was drawn by the deteriorated phone booth.

Did she know any numbers, though? Only one, she realized. She didn't think she had memorized it. Dialing it, she kept one hand rubbing up and down her torso as she shivered. When the voice answered, she wasn't expecting any emotion but urgency to well up—but she cried.

"Ezra," she sobbed in relief, "I don't know where I am, I… I woke up in the woods, and I'm naked, and… C-can you come get me? Please?"

Within a few minutes Ezra, who suspected Aria had to be somewhere near Radley, was braking next to the dilapidated phone booth with no Aria in plain sight. "Aria?" he called out as he stepped out. Just like she asked, he went to the side of the forest opposite of the booth and placed the neatly folded pile of clothes on the bordering grass. Then he turned away and smashed his human instinct to spin around at the rustle behind him.

"Thank you," she murmured as she appeared from behind a trunk, his old clothes draping on her small body.

"It's no problem. I'll drive you back—"

"No!" she interrupted, and an awkward pause ensued. "I mean… I don't want to go back right away. I'm out in the world, and I…I want to see it. Please let me see it."

Of course Ezra was conflicted with the questionable situation at hand. What were the consequences of not returning a mental patient at the moment of capture?

But how were they to know when Ezra "found" Aria? They wouldn't, which led to his prompt agreement of showing her the world: the world of Rosewood, through a calmer lens untainted by rowdy parties. However, as each monument—the ice cream parlor, the library, the high school—passed by, Aria was silent, as though traumatized by her mischief in the woods. How could her exuberant traipsing…not be what it was?

"How are your arms feeling?" Ezra casually asked without much thinking beforehand. He meant to ask how she was doing, but that felt more thoughtless.

Consciously Aria skimmed her fingers down the raw, tender gashes. "Swollen." She was honest, and chose to not overhype the pain. After all, if she thought hard enough, there was no pain: only dried blood and puffiness.

"Don't worry too much about it," he reassured her, and forced a smile. "I'm well equipped with medical emergency supplies back home."

The reason for the fake grin was this: the red veins gouged in Aria's skin was a reminder of how Ezra's own brother attempted to rip away his other life. Something about reading about how in older times, they would bleed people for everything: headache, exhaustion, possession. Wes was only nine years old; Ezra was sixteen, and the first time he had witnessed Wes's demons. It was also the first time he ever had to call 911: "I think my brother tried to kill himself."

The gray circles bruised under Aria's eyes was yet another reminder of Wes; the further Wes's other personality consumed him, the less sleep he got until the bullet took away all of his agony. It made Ezra wonder how he would react if Aria ever did the same: how Mike would feel, how Spencer would feel—how her parents would feel, if anything at all. Or worse: if they felt relief, like his mom had over Wes being put to rest, not admitting that she couldn't handle a son who—

"You're swerving."

Aria's voice tugged him back to reality and Ezra's grip tightened on the wheel and readjusted what could have been a nasty road bump. "Sorry," he apologized, and the silence encased them the rest of the way.

In Ezra's home, Aria found the roomiest, homiest space was the living room, and she pointed out any source of Ezra's life she was curious to hear about. "Is that your mom?" she asked about a picture of him in a graduation cap and gown and a woman on his side. "Can I flip through this yearbook?" "Can I look at this album?" "Can I look at your books?"—all while Ezra wrapped her wounds.

Questions flowed through Aria with no other explanation but idle curiosity: though Ezra didn't know that deeper down, to the core, Aria was only fulfilling what she would never get to see: herself in a graduation uniform, her parents with her, happy for her; her baby albums; a home to make her own. Her life ended in the third grade. Why did she ever think she could reincarnate?

"Most people my age have dated, gone to school dances, embarrassed themselves in front of their crush, possibly had their first kiss… And I haven't had any of that. I'm still stuck here—," Aria tapped her head while her other finger went over the crisp pages of Ezra's high school prom, "—as much as I'm stuck in Radley." She wanted to add "And it isn't fair," but Ezra more than anyone else she knew understood that.

When Ezra returned from the kitchen with some snacks and water, Aria was curled up on the couch, sound asleep. Like many nice people, Ezra draped a blanket over her and left her to be. Once his footsteps faded away, Aria let the tears she'd trapped escape.

It wasn't like he would care that much anyway—and she didn't want him to. Not if all he saw in her was the sibling he no longer had, the chance of redemption. She didn't need to be saved. The only chance she had of being saved was if she met Ezra's brother formerly and shook his hand.

And she couldn't do that to her friends or Ezra. She couldn't even do it to herself, even if it killed the monster inside her.

…

"Aria," a teasing voice whispered. "Come play with us!"

Sometimes dreams felt like reality, and others drifted through completely aware that none of it was real. Aria understood that about this new dream. She was in the forest again, following a disembodied voice that pulled her towards its nonexistence. The forest dispersed into a field, and Emily, Hanna, and Spencer sat cross-legged on a blanket in the grass, giggling about something.

And though Aria understood that reality was nonexistent, she sprinted over to them anyway. "Hey, guys," she said involuntarily. She meant to ask what they were doing here, but it was too late for her to recognize that she was the disembodied voice separating from the body she thought she attached to.

It was a trick straight from the book of her dual self. Aria didn't have friends; A did. Aria didn't find the simple beauty of dancing naked in a shadowy forest; A did. Aria felt alone…and maybe A did, too. But A was too cunning and sinister to uncover her true emotions. After all, that's not what villains did.

Awaking from her dream, Aria wiped the sweat on the back of her neck and felt a cool object clatter from her other hand. The wetness spread around her hairline like a watery halo. Standing over her was Ezra, palms up in defeat. "What happened?" she croaked, and noticed the gashes on her arms were reopened.

Swallowing the ball that had grown in his throat, Ezra picked up the knife and set it on the bookshelf away from her. "I came to check on you, and you were humming something and you had the knife…"

" _What is life without pain, without blood?" Her pupil-dilated eyes reflected off the stainless steel. It was like nothing he had experienced with Wes: this was truly a possession. She held the knife out to him, the red dripping on the carpet. "Want to try? It's only a pinch."_

"Oh no…" Aria placed her hand over her chest; she thought her heart might give out. "Oh…" She furiously wrapped the blanket over her arms. "I'm sorry…" And she denied Ezra's reassurance. In fact, she was too embarrassed to look in his face and see what she always dreaded: that people would fear her.

After washing the knife, Ezra returned to his sanctuary—his bedroom—and picked up the notebook Aria was used to seeing her thoughts be immortalized in every week. The notes were neat, preserved, eager.

He dumped it in the trash.

Many people feared themselves. But for Aria, it was more than just the fear of her subconscious, or her capabilities of what she could to others. It was a dread of what she was able to do to herself when she wasn't even aware of who she was.


	14. Chapter 14: Hanna

**Chapter 14: Hanna**

At breakfast the next morning, Hanna slapped her mostly empty tray on the table and plopped down next to Emily. Peeling the skin off her apple, she noticed one of their own wasn't there—and how Spencer picked at the ends of her hair and Emily avoided her eyes. "Where's Aria?" Hanna inquired, and her heart inadvertently sped up.

"In locked-down mode," Spencer mumbled at her oatmeal.

" _What?_ " Hanna exclaimed, loud enough for a few heads to turn their way.

"Shhh!" Emily shushed her. "Keep your voice down. Who knows how these patients will feel if one us got taken down."

"Taken down _how_?" Hanna stammered.

Glancing around her, Spencer leaned across the table so that she was closer to Hanna after she knew no one was still staring. "I saw Ezra drop her off this morning and explain he found her along the side of the road on his way to work. The nurses tried to get her to confess if somebody had helped her escape because there's no way she could have made it out, even in her other self."

Hanna wrinkled her forehead, but, after reminding herself that it would leave her skin dented, relaxed. "Do we believe that?"

"I don't know," Spencer murmured. "That's all I heard before they led her to the elevator and took her down."

"Wait, there's a lower floor than the ground floor?"

Emily nodded. "A basement _not_ used for storage."

Gulping nervously, Hanna rotated her head around her shoulder to stare at the elevator. "Then what's down there?"

By that point, Spencer knew she couldn't keep down any more food. "We have no idea."

And that was all Hanna remembered of that conversation—until she woke up an hour later in a white-walled room with white sheets and white uniforms and white linoleum floors. The only color that broke the uniformity was dark hair in dark clothes. "Em?" she croaked in a murmur. The shadowy girl stood up from her chair and propped herself on Hanna's bedside. The blurry vision morphed into clarity—and it was Emily. "What happened?"

Emily placed her hand over Hanna's. "You passed out. The doctors…" She trailed off, biting her lip.

"The doctors…what?" But Hanna already knew what, and she trailed her hand across her protruding ribcage. When she glanced down at what she felt, it wasn't dented or shrunken, it was just normal.

Ingesting the clump in her throat, Emily inhaled deeply in an attempt to banish the pounding headache she was developing from her weeks of practicing tolerance in this place—and now her friend was dying. "They said if you don't start eating again, you…you won't make it. It's been too little for too long, Hanna. And I know that's now what you want to hear, but it's the truth."

When Hanna parted her lips, she thought she was going to say something in her defense, but instead her vocal chords were dry, and she withered back. Luckily for her, Caleb entered before an unbearable silence endured. "What are you doing here?"

Caleb seemed angry, but he could never be angry at someone who needed help. It wasn't his nature; it was the reason why he was the only person who interned at this place, because no one else wanted to handle this without pay. "It's kind of normal for someone to show up when one of the patients they're assigned to is in the hospital." Sighing, his shoulders sagged, and what Hanna once saw as a tough, fuming wall of disappointment was now defeated—but still held some of that disappointment. "You told me the exercises were helping."

He was talking about the therapy she was going through to accept that a few hundred calories weren't going to make her gain ten pounds in one sitting, and to commence the introduction of more food into her system. It was probably the only way she hadn't ended up in this bed sooner, an IV in her arm. The IV… She poked where it was attached in her arms. "How many calories is this giving me?"

"It doesn't matter, Hanna," Caleb told her. "It's not a decision anymore. It's to save your life."

Hanna could feel her bottom lip tremble. "But I don't—"

"Have a problem, I know," Caleb interjected. "But you don't want to die, do you?"

Gulping, Hanna thoughtlessly placed her hands on her face, felt the bones of her cheeks poking her. The window, as it was pitch dark outside, reflected what she saw: a face not hollowed out. Then what were her hands feeling?

But before she could answer Caleb, she'd waited too long and he snapped, "It's still your choice, then. I can't help you if you don't want it," and stormed out of the room.

"Caleb!" Hanna called back, but her cry was too weak, too…forced. It was to make him come back so that she could lie to him, and she was tired of lying. But she couldn't bear to admit that she'd been lying to herself for weeks. If she couldn't trust herself, who could she trust?

For the first time since she was admitted here, understanding struck Hanna, a comprehension of what Aria was going through for ten years. The flutter in her chest, the one of adrenaline from her recent argument with Caleb, died out. It was terrifying, to feel this way. And Hanna had chalked Aria up as crazy.

If she was, though, then they all were losing their minds. None of them could trust themselves: Hanna couldn't trust what she saw, what she believed; Spencer couldn't trust the addiction her brain wanted fulfilled, the one that whispered to her, "It's only one pill…"; and Emily…

"Well, that was harsh" was Emily's lone response to what had ensued in front of her. What else was there to say? She wasn't one to damage feelings and trust.

But Hanna hadn't heard her. Instead, with eyes round and bulging like saucers in a skull, Hanna asked what she'd been processing in her mind from the moment her fingers recognized what her eyes weren't catching. "Do you ever fear yourself, Em?"

In Emily's mind, she thought of when she was younger and found Alison DiLaurentis beautiful enough to kiss, but then went to Sunday school where she was taught about sexualities that belonged in hell, and she began to wonder: _is the Devil inside me?_

This time, Emily stared in the window, and what she saw on the outside was something she could trust. It was in her eyes, though, that she was frightened of a possession of wrongful temptation. "Every day," she replied to Hanna, and reached out to clasp Hanna's hand. "But don't worry about me. Let's focus on you feeling better."

 _But I feel fine,_ Hanna wanted to protest. She couldn't even remember feeling sick before passing out. Instead of expressing this, she waved it off. "Oh, it's fine. I just need some salt, that's all."

Emily wanted to tell her that it wasn't "fine," that it wasn't "all." But like Hanna, she didn't say this, and got up to get her friend some pretzels, even though she knew she would only lick the salt off, and her body would continue to die.

…

A couple days later, Hanna was back in her daily routine, and didn't hold a grudge against Caleb as much as he did against her. _How was that supposed to help her?_ she wanted to ask. But he was right that she never truly believed in their one-on-one sessions, and she wasn't ready to admit that to him, or to herself.

Meals were now a bother, as Emily tried to be supportive, but not too pushy. "Eat something, Han, please. An apple, for me?" Spencer watched the awkward ordeal and cringed. But Hanna only thanked Emily for caring, and Emily backed off. Later Spencer was chided by Emily for not caring about Hanna's _life_ , but Spencer defended herself in the same way Caleb had, that fixing her wasn't an option if Hanna didn't believe it. "There has to be something, though…," Emily had said after being broken down by Spencer and joining her side. The friends had no clue, even in the urgency of their rapidly deteriorating friend.

And then there was Aria, who, a week after Hanna landed in the hospital, was still not back from wherever the nurses took her. It was unfortunate to admit that Aria's only three friends hadn't had much time to think about her, other than the constant worry they had churning their guts. But unlike Hanna, Aria understood herself as best as she could, and was more accepting of new ways of help despite her thinking it might not work, and that was why Spencer and Emily worried, but weren't as concerned as they were about Hanna. Aria was a fighter; Hanna didn't even think she was fighting.

However, Emily's everyday prodding, and Spencer's occasional acknowledgement of Emily's concerns being accurate, made Hanna begin to boil—until she lost her top, and she slammed her fist onto the table. "You don't understand what it was like to be that fat!" she nearly yelled. Her outburst wasn't unusual at Radley mealtime, so no stranger aimed their eyes at her in curiosity. But Emily and Spencer, rather than apologize or recognize that Hanna's reasons were valid, stared at Hanna's hands with their jaws dropped open like a hungry snake's.

When Hanna looked at what they were looking at, her heart almost jumped out of her throat. Her annoyance was strong enough that she didn't feel the fork poke through her fist. Even more annoyed, Hanna chewed the inside of her cheek to loosen the building tension—doesn't a fork usually fly when you slam it that way?—and easily tugged the fork out, wrapping her fist in a napkin. "It's fine, okay?" she said in a strained manner. "It barely went in."

Still frustrated, Hanna dumped her tray in the trash and fought the temptation to run out of the room in humiliation. Sometimes she hated being such a drama queen, but the impulse to escape from the friends suffocating her was stronger than her rational thoughts.

Why was everyone tiptoeing around her? Hanna was snug in her thoughts, just like her nails were snug in the pink gel polish she was able to smuggle in from another patient. In times of stress, she needed to smother her nails with pretty chemicals. Good thing her toes were free.

Was it because she couldn't handle some harsh words? Because she could. She could fight back viciously with words, if need be. Suddenly a jolting pain kicked her stomach, and the wind was consequently knocked out of her lungs. It was the same stabbing aches she'd had when she began limiting her diet months ago. A growl gurgled inside, like her belly was crying—and she shivered in discomfort. There was no way she was going to cave into her body's desires when it had plenty already.

At dinner, after a long hour of intense cognition, Hanna had built up the courage to please her friends and reassure their anxieties: she ate half a piece of lasagna. Spencer's fork, covered in green beans, paused before her mouth as she watched Hanna eat, shocked. Emily let go of her utensils and clapped her hands. "Hanna!" she exclaimed, and draped her arms around her. "I'm so proud of you! Oh, you'll be better in no time, and then we'll be one step closer to leaving this place…" And Hanna set her fork down, stopped listening. She'd gotten so used to living in Radley, she forgot that there was a life waiting for her outside the gates: a life with her mother, with Sean, with her friends Naomi and Riley…

But who was to say what would happen to any of them if Hanna made it out? Maybe Aria would be a permanent case. Or Emily would leave before them (as she shouldn't be here at all), relish in a normal life, and forget that the rest of them were still trapped here. It wasn't fair, for any of them, really, to be friends like they were. Because who was to say it would last past these walls?

…

Unfortunately, Hanna had a session with Caleb right after dinner, and couldn't stop at the bathroom on the way. She pushed through the unbearable amount of talking she had to do ("What did the doctor tell you to do?" "Are you following his advice?" "Are you listening to me, Hanna?" "If you don't follow it, they'll be forced to take action, which I know you don't like.") By the end, she calmly said, "I think this should be my last session. I find the attitude unhelpful," and scampered out before he could see past her shocking sass and notice that her hand was over her stomach in pain.

After eating, the aches had become torturous, as though her stomach was gnawing on her organs. Bolting into the bathroom, it was easy for her to dispel of what little she'd consumed. But she hadn't waited long enough—because Caleb, leaving Radley for the day, passed by that bathroom on his way out, and the sound of vomiting was what he was assigned to help in (unless the patient was sick with a flu).

Without reluctance Caleb crossed what many average people considered a barrier, and recognized the girl who hadn't closed the stall in her rush. "Hanna!" But instead of turning around to defend her dignity, he saw her shoulders slump, and then shake.

"I-I have a problem," she whispered, almost incoherently, but Caleb caught it. "I—"

"You don't have to say it again," he reassured her, and offered to help her up. "Come on. You need to rest, and we can get started first thing in the morning." As Hanna's clammy hand grasped his shoulder, he said, "Hey. I'm proud of you, Hanna."

That's what Emily had told her, and she didn't care about how much that statement meant to her until she heard it a second time from someone else. "Thank you," she murmured, and said nothing more.

On the way out, her eyes caught her reflection, and that image she always had shattered. Her cheeks were sunken in. Her ribs poked out above her miniscule waist. Her knees were knobs supported by sticks. She had…vanished. A sack of bones and skin.

The rest of the night, that reflection haunted her, reiterating in her sleep, _What have you done, what have you done, what have you done…_


	15. Chapter 15: Spencer

**Chapter 15: Spencer**

Another week passed, and Aria was still locked away somewhere the girls hadn't seen. But their lives didn't stop. With Hanna improving, Spencer chided her that she should be catching up in school so that she didn't fall behind. That's what they were doing right then: studying in Spencer's room, like normal high school students (if normal was a bedroom with bars over the window).

But Spencer was distracted. It was— _finally_ —the day Toby was coming around and they were going to sneak into the record room and find Mona's folder. If she could piece this puzzle together, Aria could rest in piece that Mona would be moved to another, stronger-holding institution far away from here. And maybe Aria would be able to heal without Mona distracting her, and Spencer wouldn't have to leave her behind.

"Spence, are you gonna help us catch up with our schoolwork or not?" Hanna laughed along with Emily as they munched on cheesy puffs. "I've missed these," she said to Emily, but purposefully forgot to mention that the burning energy inside her to spit it out struggled with her.

"Sorry, guys, but I'm so close to really helping Aria get out of this place," Spencer vaguely explained while unfolding the notes she'd taken of Mona possibly hurting Alison for Aria's sake. A week ago, Toby made a quick visit to update her on Alison's case. There was still nothing except the evidence that someone snuck out of Radley that night, the main suspect returning to Aria after her dream-like breakout. "But what about Mona?" Spencer had whined, and Toby had shrugged his shoulders and explained he was suddenly kicked off the case. For today, Toby told her to meet him in the room he'd interrogated her in at three o'clock. It was 2:50.

"How?" Hanna scoffed insensitively, and Emily slapped her shoulder. "Hanna!" she hissed.

"I'm sorry!" Hanna exclaimed, putting her hands up in defense. "But I'm being honest with myself now, and my honesty is telling me that I'm concerned Aria won't be able to make it out of here. I mean, I've accepted, for the most part, that I need to follow the advice I'm given, Spencer hasn't taken a pill in a couple weeks despite her wacky withdrawal symptoms, and if you keep playing against the therapist's cards, Em, you're out of here, too. But Aria? Things just seem to be getting…worse."

As soon as Hanna trailed off in expressing her worry, a shadow, obstructed by the light of the hallway, stood in front of the door. It stepped forward revealing a familiar face with unrecognizable stitches going up her arms. "Aria!" the three friends cried, and Emily was the first to press into Aria's shoulder as the others squeezed in.

"I've missed you guys!" Aria said, choking back the relief relishing in the back of her eye sockets. Spencer was the first to bring up her sustained injuries. "What happened?" she gasped, her finger trailing along the stitches that were almost healed.

Once she was freed from her friends' circling (and crushing) embrace, Aria gestured for them to settle down because she had a lot of important stuff to tell. "If you didn't already know, I went through a crazy experience a couple weeks ago where I snuck out of Radley in what I thought was a dream… And my other identity did this to me—" She pointed to the stitches. "—but now, after some intensive care where I was watched twenty-four hours a day, I _might_ not hurt myself anymore. They wanted to keep me until I was ready to explain how I got out, too. I told them about my dream that must not have been a dream, but then I remembered something… Mona was there. _She_ showed me out of Radley."

" _You deserve it, Aria, for being the model patient." Winking, Mona sauntered away, leaving Aria with the nurse's uniform in her arms. "See? I'm not so bad. I'm still your friend."_

"Somehow she got a nurse's uniform and ID. That's how she's been sneaking out for years."

"Aren't you worried that you'll hurt yourself again?" Spencer inquired, apprehensive.

"Of course. But I can't live every day of my life in fear, Spence. I just can't anymore."

The girls nodded their heads in expression of understanding, but Aria could see past Hanna biting her lip, Emily twirling her hair, Spencer chewing at her cuticle. "Or maybe I'm crazy…"

In less than a second, Spencer was sputtering, "Don't say that! None of us are crazy, this _place_ is. _Society_ is for making us feel like we're untreatable dangers to it. In fact, most of the people here are amazing! Like this guy Bill, in my therapy group, he trained his dog to balance anything on its nose. And Sarah painted the most mesmerizing painting that depicted how my addiction felt. We're broken people, sure. But we're healing inside just as much as anyone with a broken bone."

Hanna placed her palm on Emily's knee. Continuing off of Spencer's speech, she added, "Except for you, Em. You never belonged here."

Aria sat next to Spencer and leaned on her shoulder. "You always know what to say, Spence."

By the time Spencer was able to squirm her way out of a much-needed comfort session, she was almost thirty minutes late to meet Toby. "I'm sorry I'm late!" she panted as she shut the door behind her. "Aria came back, and I—"

"You can tell me on the way, Spence." Toby intervened and opened the door Spencer had just so carefully closed with a _click_. As they nonchalantly strolled down the hallways, Spencer's heart began to pound. Soon they'd be in a room with file cabinets stuffed to the max with decades of secrets. Who knew what they were going to find?

The record room happened to be in the basement. Rather than take the obvious elevator, they found a back stairwell and tiptoed down it. It was fortunate that they weren't being caught. For an asylum, Radley didn't seem like such a secure place now.

Once the metal stairwell converged into un-swept concrete floors, Spencer had to pause and inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. What if this room Aria was kept in was like the one in movies, with the pure white walls and squishy padding, and Aria didn't bother sharing that fact with them? How was Spencer going to feel when she saw something like that, unable to help those in it?

But Toby pushed open the door, and there were no rooms that drove already unstable people insane. Instead it was like the normal ones upstairs. The heart beating in Spencer's neck slid back down to where it belonged.

"This is going to sound really weird," Spencer whispered as she picked the lock of the record room and Toby kept watch. "But solving this mystery, focusing on Aria's wellbeing and helping her study and stuff, it's distracted me. I'm getting better. I haven't told anyone this yet, but the doctors think I'll be able to leave in a week."

It was the truth, of course. Why would Spencer lie about such a thing as her wellbeing by this point? She was, most likely, going to be out next week. It only took her two weeks in Radley of dying over her need for Adderall, then the symptoms diminished.

She could have been out of Radley weeks ago, but she wouldn't tell her friends that.

It wasn't that hard to lie to the doctors here. All Spencer had to answer were "yes or no" questions on how she was feeling, and they'd nod their heads and advise her on how to get better—and it didn't take her long to suck up her pride and listen. She didn't even need to be here, if it wasn't for the relationships she'd made—the kind she couldn't leave behind without leaving a part of herself, and she preferred to come out whole.

And it wasn't like she was going to be alone out of Radley that long. Emily should be out soon. Hanna had a few more weeks. And Aria, well… They covered that earlier. But Spencer wasn't going to give up on her. (She'd say "never," but who was she to make promises she wasn't sure she could keep once the taste of freedom drove her through school, family, and life?)

"That's great, Spencer," Toby said, and a part of him was happy to see Spencer out and revived. But he couldn't help thinking about his mother, and how she wasn't as fortunate. However, that tragedy in his short nineteen years was the driving force into much of what he was doing now: like breaking into confidential records to help a patient he knew from high school whose friend had multiple personalities.

"I'm not leaving before we solve this, though," Spencer added on to her expression of freedom. "So don't get too excited _just_ yet."

The most complex question they were facing in that moment was where to begin their search. File cabinet after file cabinet lined the walls up to the ceiling. "Is there even a ladder?" Spencer mumbled to herself, but Toby happened to catch it.

"Over here," he called back, hoping they wouldn't need to use it; it looked untrustworthy.

Scanning the tags on the drawers with Toby's extra flashlight, Spencer pursed her lips in concentration. "Are these sorted by year or last name?" The labels were too smudged to decipher a number from a letter.

Toby pulling open a creaky drawer. "Last name."

Nodding her head, Spencer retraced her steps so she was closer to the beginning. "You look for Mona, I'll look for Alison."

 _DiLaurentis, DiLaurentis, DiLaurentis…_ For such an uncommon name, it was certainly difficult to uncover. But after a few minutes of vigorous scavenging that got Spencer's skull pounding, Spencer discovered the fresh manila folder that could hold the answers to all the mystery Spencer had thrown herself into since the second Aria stepped a foot into her life.

Skimming through it, it didn't appear to hold much. Age, weight, eye color… Eighteen, one-hundred-twenty, blue… Birthdate, legal name, parental guardians… December fifteenth, Alison Lauren DiLaurentis, Kenneth and Jessica DiLaurentis… Any past treatments… No, this would be the first… Reasons for institutionalization…

Nothing was written down.

"Spencer?" Toby cried out, and Spencer placed the folder in its original spot, delicately like it was as weathered and fragile as the ones surrounding it.

"What?" She hopped down off the ladder and followed the echo of his voice.

He stood at the end of the vast hall, his hand buried in a drawer. "Thomas, Thompson, Underling, Vincent…" To prove his point, he pointed out each folder in succession, no gaps in between.

The blood that had rushed to Spencer's head in her rigid determination to uncover Alison's secrets froze in her veins. "W-what does that mean?" she stammered, but Spencer knew as much as Toby that she was smarter than that.

She watched as the clang of the drawer holding nothing but dusty history echoed in the chamber. It didn't take much to break her fragile state, as her heart broke when Toby shrugged his shoulders and confessed, "There's nothing here."

…

Returning from the Underworld wasn't the victory Spencer had anticipated it to be. Instead, she was a zombie and not a hero.

The worst part of the scenario that she kept playing in her head—the double, triple, quadruple checking of the files—was that Spencer utterly doubted Aria's mental state.

But why would Aria lie?

When Spencer padded into the room with stiff feet, Aria was propped on her bed with a sketchbook in her lap. Spencer had noticed Aria reattempting to draw, though Spencer could see the painful twitches in Aria's eyes as she strained her wrist to bend it like it once did. "Do you think Ezra's cute?" was the question she queried now, and Spencer wondered if she was doodling his name with hearts over it like Spencer had when she had a crush on Andrew Campbell in the fifth grade.

In Aria's time in captivity in the basement of Radley, she had a dream that she kissed Ezra—not that she thought too deep into that. He did seem to care about her, though. He listened to why she didn't want to go to a hospital to get her stitches done, that she just wanted to go back and see her friends because she needed them. _Not that you're not a friend_ , she had confessed, _but we have a different friendship, you know? A brother-sister one. Maybe it's because I remind you of your brother, and I see that. But right now, I need you to trust me and take me back to Radley._ Why she was having romantic dreams of him when she described him as a brother, well, she wasn't mastered in the field of psychology. But she _was_ able to admit, "I think he's cute."

But Spencer didn't want to talk about whether she thought Ezra was attractive or not. There were much more significant things at stake that didn't include Spencer's word with or against Aria's.

"Tell me, Aria." The warmness in the air that had fluttered around Aria dissipated into a vacuum. "Why is there no record of a Mona Vanderwaal ever being a patient here?"


	16. Chapter 16: The Crazy Ones

**Chapter 16: The Crazy Ones**

Emily hadn't been keeping track of how many sessions she'd had evaluating her "sinful sexuality," but it began to weigh on her like Aria's ten years must have chained her down. It wasn't that complicated, really; she did everything the therapist told her to. Say no to this woman, he commanded her, and she did. Reject the body you lust for so much. (Not that Emily thought the chosen women were that attractive.) It was giving her headaches—searing, penetrating aches and stabs that were certainly coming from her heart, or from God.

The idea driven into her mind her entire time at Radley was that something was wrong with her. It was an idea she'd had before, and doubted plenty, but the way that she was treated sickened her. She knew a gay man once, and she never saw him as anything different, anything terribly sinful. But her parents weren't here, and neither were these doctors, to remind her of what she couldn't see, that devil inside her.

It was enough to drive her mad. In fact, she was surprised her parents' signing off on brain surgery hadn't set off the loony bomb. It should have been enough to lead her off the edge, but it wasn't—and the implications of that worried her, but also made her chin less heavy so that she could hold it higher.

On her way back from a meeting, Emily's shoulder bumped into someone rounding the corner, knocking the flash of blond hair into the wall. "I'm so sorry!" Emily frantically apologized, and the blonde shot her a nasty look. Rather than return it, Emily recognized the girl and decided to be the polite person she was. "Oh hey, Bethany. How's it been?"

Sneering, Bethany fervently pushed past Emily and scoffed, "Ex _cuse_ me, my name is Sara!" before stomping away and shaking her head vehemently. If Emily squinted her eyes, she would have guessed the object moving away from her was a blazing flame.

In Spencer and Aria's room, the day was just heating up. "Why would you lie to me?" Spencer screamed, which was very much unlike her—but then again, she was very much upset and, most of all, betrayed. After all, the person she was putting her heart into helping (though in a slightly selfish way to abbreviate the path to her cure) was exactly what people had warned her about in the beginning. Mona wasn't real, which could only mean that Aria was deluded—and crazy after all.

With a shudder, Spencer thought of all of the nights in Radley, all the times an insane person was with her in her most vulnerable state. There was more Spencer wanted to say—seething words she wanted to spit out—but she was rendered speechless.

Once Emily made it back to her room alive—she was expecting an impulsive, wrathful attack from "Sara"—she spurted out to Hanna, "I think I've seen your old roommate. Bethany."

Hanna, who was curled up on her bed flipping through a magazine, immediately threw the glossy papers to the floor and sat up, draping her legs over the edge. "What do you mean?"

"She's blonde, has some scars, is extremely nice… I didn't think it was her before, but then she acted all…weird."

"Weird as in…?"

"She told me her name was Sara, and bruised my shoulder passing by me."

Body temperature dropping, Hanna had to lie down as her blood pressure slowed to what a hospital monitor would describe as a flatline. "She's been on this floor this entire time?"

As Spencer's fists trembled in their tight clench, Aria resisted her pounding heart's instinct to stumble back or flee. There was no possible way Mona wasn't real—Aria had seen her, talked to her, touched her, _lived_ with her. Every memory of Mona—when they told stories of how when they were first brought in, they were unaware of why they weren't allowed home; when they complained about the beds being too cold; when they made their own dolls out of the few materials they were allowed to craft with; when they snuck in books about puberty and were baffled over where babies came from and how they were going to bleed every month without dying of blood loss; when Aria confessed how stupid she felt for peeking into a science textbook in Radley's library and recognizing nothing—replayed in Aria's pulsing mind.

After some of the shock had worn off, she scoffed and shook her head. "Typical Mona." The flames ignited in Spencer's eyes were there to burn Aria—but, just like that, Aria felt no more fear. "Don't you see what she's doing? She stole her own folder because she knew your curiosity ran too deep, and you would uncover every terrible thing she's ever done and make _you_ look like the better friend."

The numb vocal chords that had refused to vibrate warmed rapidly, and Spencer yelled, "Well, if that's true, then it's working." Spencer chewed the inside of her cheek. "I can't help but be angry, Aria. With every discovery I've made, Mona's been…nowhere."

"So you don't believe me when I tell you the stories of me seeing her?" The doubt drenching Spencer's demeanor unraveled Aria, and she grappled with the urgent need to cry. Mona was real—she woke her up in the middle of the night, showed up at the Khans' party, led her out of confinement with a nurse's uniform in hand. She was her _roommate_ for _years_ , damn it! "Leave it to the crazy ones to believe they're sane," she spat before rushing past Spencer and out the door.

In normal circumstances, Spencer would have cried out, "Aria, wait!" but she couldn't rustle up the courage to run after someone she wasn't sure she believed in anymore. Instead she felt the wall support her back and her jelly-like muscles bring her to the ground, allowing Aria to run with no reason to consider turning around.

"Call me officially terrified." Hanna gulped in hope that the action would take her nerves with her. She paced in front of her bed, and questioned how many times Bethany might have considered coming here in the middle of the night to finish Hanna off with that knife. "What do we do?" she whined.

Chin in hand, Emily shut her eyes to attempt brainstorming. "We look at her files" was what she came up with.

"What?" Hanna shrieked. "No, we can't do that! We'll get caught and then we'll never get out of here." The idea of being confined in Radley for the rest of her life even after she healed was more terrifying than Bethany on the loose.

"Spencer and Toby were able to—" Emily paused in her defense as a light dawned on her. "Toby! He'll let us into the record room."

Scoffing, Hanna picked up her magazine and smacked it on her nightstand. "Yeah right. The only reason he helped Spencer was because Aria was a part of his case, not Bethany."

The light receded into plain darkness, but the motivation didn't leave with it. "It's still worth a try." She walked out the door and waved Hanna along. "Come on! He's always here at this time."

Rolling her eyes, Hanna crossed a pair of fingers behind her back and prayed for the first time since she stopped going to church when she was nine.

The children's ward was the impeccable place to hide: it was abandoned and chock-full of spider webs. No one had the guts or the need to go down there. But Aria, she was a part of that ward before it was closed almost four years after she'd arrived here. She knew every crook, cranny, cradle, and doll. She and Mona had even discovered secret passageways nurses were taught to find in case of a dangerous patient situation. It would have been their secret, too, if they hadn't gotten stuck in one and a nurse fetched them out and reported that the kids knew about its clandestine location.

Now Aria crawled through one of these passageways to shortcut it to the playroom. She stumbled and fell on her damaged wrist, which electrified her nerves to the point that her teeth clenched. But she got back up and kept her pace up, massaging the tender bone of a joint with poor recovery. Scooting the bookcase to the side, Aria tripped into her safe haven, collapsing on the dusty carpet and exhaling the air that was locked in her lungs.

As Hanna tried to keep up with Emily rounding all the corners, Emily could have sprinted to the lobby if Hanna didn't have to build up her strength. "Em, slow down!" she complained, but Emily was unable to control her feet; she was focused on crumbling down all of this mystery and fear into harmless flecks.

Luck happened to be on their side as Emily almost skidded into Toby. "Officer!" she squeaked out of embarrassment. Then, flicking the humiliation aside, she got straight down to the point: "We need to speak to you," and she gestured to her and a panting Hanna.

A nervous spread of sweat cooled on Toby's hairline. "About what?" But he knew what it was going to be about.

In a millisecond, Emily was blurting out, "It's Aria. She doesn't believe us. So we need to get into the record room to prove to her that all of this Mona stuff is true."

The request, oddly enough, didn't make Toby uncomfortable. In fact, his thought process went something like: _If I could get Spencer there with no trouble, I could get them there_. What did he have to lose anymore, anyway? Following the law didn't seem to help as much as breaking it.

"Follow me," he whispered, and the girls skimmed the perimeters to see if there was anyone around. There wasn't.

The dust coating the doll came off in fluffy strips as Aria's fingers brushed the synthetic hair. The window was grimy, so the light filtering in was dark. But Aria didn't need to be pampered at the moment; she just needed to be alone. And alone she was on the dusty carpeting. Even the spider webs adorning the ceiling were abandoned.

"Aria?" a voice echoed, and Aria wasn't surprised. A short figure in a fluffy white robe stepped out from the way Aria had come and pushed her brown hair behind her ear.

"Mona." Aria wanted to growl, but it, much in Aria's distaste, came out as normal, welcoming, almost.

There were less light bulbs than Hanna was expecting in such a big, already-gloomy place. She gripped her arms over her chest and rubbed the sword-like hair on her skin. "Let's make this quick," she murmured between her clenched teeth as she held back a shiver.

Emily scurried down the linoleum path and got a sense of how the records were organized. "Bethany Young…," she uttered under her breath once she reached the Ys. A trembling Hanna caught up to her. "Here it is."

"What are you here for, Mona?" Aria set the doll tenderly back in the crib, positioning it so that it was sitting comfortably rather than splayed out on its side like how she had found it.

The dark-eyed sneak retied the knot on her rob, appearing weaker than she ever had. "I want to tell you something."

Aria bit her bottom lip to prevent her from exploding with irritation. She couldn't take it with Mona's ambiguity anymore. "Tell me what?"

The strangest thing happened: Mona cried. She caught her tears in a tissue she tugged out of her pocket, except for one, which darkened a spot on the carpet. Aria fought the urge to touch it, to evaluate its authenticity. But Mona inhaled, her chest expanding like she was preparing to go into battle and needed to look tougher, and replied, "Everything."

…

The file Emily had uncovered had one piece of information that caused the folder to slip out of her hands. "What is it?" Hanna asked in alarm.

But Emily found it difficult to remove her hands from her mouth. "Bethany was the blonde who fell off the roof."

Then Hanna remembered: Aria was with Mona when a girl had fallen (or was pushed) off the roof. "That explains her scars," Hanna whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

Shaking her head, Emily stuffed the folder back where she found it and grabbed Hanna's hand. "We need to get to Spencer. Now."

Hanna was taken aback and felt compelled to tug her hand free, but didn't. "Why?"

"Because we need to end all of this, or Aria might end up just like Bethany."

"Em, you don't think—"

"It was never Aria we had to be afraid of. It was Mona. Don't you get it? Aria remembers holding a knife, and _Mona_ was there. With her condition, Aria was easy to frame. Bethany thought she was Sara—she must have the same condition as Aria. Maybe Mona saw that as a threat, like Aria would become close to her because they shared the same illness. But we need to go, now!"

The two girls met up with Spencer and paced the bedroom, emptier without Aria.

"What do we know?" Emily plopped down on Spencer's bed with a pounding head.

"We know Aria's has three roommates—Mona, Jenna, and Alison. Jenna was blinded, and Alison disappeared after leaving Radley, and Mona was sent to the fourth floor after the incident with Bethany 'falling' off the roof. But somehow Mona is able to get out of Radley whenever she wants. Mona was involved in some incident with Aria that ended up with Bethany being pushed off the roof." Spencer could feel her morals clashing, beating each other up inside her. Who—and what—did she believe?

"It's possible Mona stole her own folder," Emily reminded them.

"What mental patient is bold, but wants to be a ghost?" Hanna quipped.

"Wait, the fourth floor…" A jolt of realization caused Spencer's eye to twitch. "Of course! If we check the fourth floor, that will prove that Mona is there. There's no way she can manipulate the entire system."

The trio rushed to the elevators and crossed every finger and toe they had that they could think their way out of this and get Aria out, too. The plan was spontaneous, and shocked them all how easily deception came to them after weeks spent in Radley: Hanna faked a nervous breakdown, Emily called for the nurse, and Spencer hopped in front of the computer once she saw that Hanna was providing a terrifying distraction. "Mona Vanderwaal," she whispered almost inaudibly as her fingers typed it into the patient records bar.

She hit "Enter."


	17. Chapter 17: The Reveal

**Chapter 17: The Reveal**

The doll was abandoned by the three syllables Mona had spoken: "Everything."

After that, everything to Aria felt like it was happening in slow motion: she dropped the doll, stumbled up onto her feet, and looked into the dark eyes that she'd trusted for most of her time here. "Don't wait."

And Mona, being as mysterious as she always had been, clasped her hands in front of her with her chin held high—and stepped methodically to the window, staring out of it. "Cut the drama, Mona!" Aria yelled loud enough that her echo shouted it back for emphasis.

A sly smirk turned up the corner of Mona's lips, but she still faced the moonlight. "I can't believe you never figured it out."

Aria could feel her hands trembling from their wrists. She attempted to keep her tough front, but she could sense her mind slipping. "Figured what out?"

If Mona hadn't appeared like a villain before, she certainly looked like one now. She turned away from the moonlight so that she could sternly gaze into Aria—and that's when it hit her, only a few milliseconds before Mona said:

"I'm A."

…

It was the third grade. Eight-year-old Rosewood Elementary School student—designated outcast, artist, and big sister—Aria Montgomery was walking home with her sketchbook in hand and halted to see the sun attempting to reach out between the spring leaves flourishing the branches. If only she could draw it, she thought. But it was a better picture done with a camera or a paintbrush. She moved on.

But then the squirrel chewing on a tree nut was an interesting image—after all, many people could see squirrels scavenging, but it was less common to see them working at cracking open a walnut.

She was halfway through her sketch, her brain churning over how to properly design the tail, when an obnoxious laugh pulled her out of her creativity. But before she could see who it was, the blonde knocked into her shoulder, and the laws of physics prompted her to collapse on the sidewalk—directly on the wrist she'd been drawing with.

There was a snap like the squirrel had scurried up the tree and broken a twig or two, and Aria was dazzled. The snap—it had to be her pencil, which was split in half. The blonde, Alison DiLaurentis, had only meant to startle her, bother her—but not seriously hurt her.

Because what Alison noticed before Aria did was the strange angle of her hand in its socket. Like any young child, when Aria realized this, she began to cry. To protect her dignity from the outside world, Alison rushed away. Thankfully, Aria's sobs-turned-screams prompted one of the neighborhood families to peek out their window.

The results came back in vain: Aria, at only eight years of age, could never express her talent—and only friend—again.

As the story went, Aria attacked Alison a couple times before being taken out of school. Spencer was the only one to notice. Byron and Ella, Aria's parents, were concerned about the frightening fit their daughter had expressed the day she got her cast removed, but didn't think it was serious until the attacks happened. Away to Radley Aria went—for her own good.

The tests—or experiments, as Aria liked to call them; she didn't mind being a guinea pig so much with the loss of her artistic dreams—were simple at first. Ink blots, tests she wasn't even aware were being done when she was only answering the psychiatrist's questions. Usual routine. But then she was diagnosed—"multiple personality disorder," the doctor had uttered to her parents like he was the diagnosing the girl from _The Exorcist_ with possession—and then came the white rooms, hypnosis, even shock therapy. Her parents were aware that Radley was outdated; but they couldn't afford to put her anywhere else.

"How do you know I have multiple personality disorder?" she asked her therapist one day. The doctor set her pen aside and smiled like she was the principal of a school praising an honors student.

"You blank out for long periods of time," she explained, "and you can't seem to remember them. You act differently, too; you don't answer to your name. You won't give us a name when we ask…" On and on she went. And that's when Aria realized: at least the white room had proven something.

It wasn't until a couple years later that Aria was granted a roommate— _finally_. Everyone else had one, she'd started to whine. Why can't I have one? The doctors would respond that her condition was too severe and ambiguous for her to room with anyone just yet. But Mona entered her life like a gift for being without a friend and passion.

"Thank you so much for the roommate!" she'd practically exclaimed to her psychiatrist the following day. Unbeknownst to Aria, her doctor scribbled and starred a note, before lying, "You're very welcome. What do you think of your roommate?"

"She's amazing!" Aria had gone on. "But she doesn't like it when I talk about her to other people. I guess she's just shy."

"Does she have a name?"

And Aria, as though she'd been possessed by something hiding inside her, answered, "That's a secret."

It dawned on Aria that none of the Radley doctors have ever asked her for a name other than her own—they only told her that she didn't respond to the question she couldn't remember them asking, making her possessed by the aggressive parasite that was Mona more often that she'd originally thought.

That didn't matter now, though—because now, Aria knew everything she'd ever wanted to know.

…

When Aria was on the cusp of turning fifteen, Mona had been able to smuggle in a couple of fireworks they would set off after sneaking outside later. "For my best friend," she'd said lovingly, and Aria felt her heart grow an inch thicker from the luck she had with such a kind roommate.

A week prior, a new girl named Bethany had been admitted. She and Aria had started talking when Bethany appeared in her group therapy session. As it turned out, Bethany was just like Aria: split in half. Except Bethany was much more fixable, as she rambled to Aria about her other self, Sara, and how she felt like the drugs they'd put her on were already working.

It was the night before Aria's birthday when Aria, who was enjoying a book about a Greek demi-god boy, was interrupted by a semi-groan, semi-scream from Mona. "What's wrong?" she inquired. She knew that Mona had some anger issues she had to work out; that was why she was at Radley.

"It's that stupid Bethany girl!" Mona growled, chewing into her bottom lip. "Aren't I your best friend?"

Aria dog-eared her page and set the book aside. "Of course."

"Then why are you hanging out with her?"

"Can I not talk to other people?"

Mona only sneered and crawled into her bed.

A couple hours ticked by, and suddenly Aria was panting, jogging up a stairwell. "Bethany, stop!" she cried out, almost able to grab her new friend's arm—but missing. "She won't hurt you!"

"Of course she will!" Bethany screamed in panic, darting through the door that led to the roof.

"Wait!" Aria shrieked, and halted before the last couple flights of stairs to catch her breath for a few seconds. Then, preparing to sprint again, she was startled by another figure: Mona.

And she was holding a knife.

"Up," Mona snarled, jutting the knife close to Aria's back and forcing Aria to do exactly what she was planning to do in the first place.

When Aria burst onto the roof, she yelled, "Bethany! Stop, please!"

"Forget that bitch," Mona ordered, and Aria's shoulders sunk out of their sockets. The roof was quiet; where was the girl who'd just run up here to escape her own self?

"What do you _want_ , Mona?" Aria spat. She was getting more than fed up with Mona lately.

But her anger dissipated into fear when Mona's infamous smirk crinkled the corners of her lips. "For you to choose." And instead of ending Aria with a violent death by Mona's own accord, Mona handed Aria the knife.

Mona pointed to the left side of her chest. "End it, please."

"Wha—" Aria held the knife, discombobulated, and was about to ask more in-depth questions when a blood-curdling scream rung out.

Dropping the knife, Aria snapped out of Mona's trance and was going to run to the sound—if Mona hadn't grabbed her first. "Don't you dare."

"I don't know what you're asking, Mona!" Aria yelled, and almost cracked Mona's wrist by how aggressively she shook herself off.

Rounding the corner, Aria skidded on her heels to stop herself from accidentally running into Bethany—and pushing her off the ledge. "Bethany, wait!"

But Bethany's hands convulsed as they held each other, and she couldn't see through through her blurry tears. "Sara doesn't want me anymore," she whispered, and took one step forward—

"Wait!" Aria screamed again, but watched in horror as Bethany jumped—and Aria could almost see a life-like twin of Bethany smiling over the ledge.

The ambulance, cops, and Radley staff found Aria on the roof, curled up next to the door, with the knife in her hand. Mona was nowhere in sight. "My roommate was there," Aria told the investigators, but Aria blanked when they asked for a name. A nurse explained her condition to the cops, then bent down to Aria's level. "Your roommate, sweetie… She's not well. She confessed to pushing your friend. We're sending her to the fourth floor."

"But…" Aria wanted to protest that that wasn't true, that Bethany had jumped on her own accord. What happened after that, her vision went hazy.

Aria couldn't remember shedding a tear; instead, she remembered the overwhelming relief when she shut her eyes and woke up alone the next morning, a birthday cupcake waiting on her food tray. (She was bedridden for the next week.) The memory of that night faded from her, until it became the doctor's words over her own: Mona was ill. She pushed Bethany off the roof…

If it only hadn't taken Aria two years to learn that Mona's intention that night was to escape from Aria just like Bethany had jumped to escape from Sara. Then maybe Aria wouldn't have suffered for those seven-hundred-and-thirty-some days.

…

Jenna Marshall didn't speak that much. It was like Aria didn't have a new roommate at all.

"What do you think of my painting?" Jenna asked Aria, the first words she'd spoken to Aria in over a week. Aria dared to glance at the artwork that burned holes in her stomach from green envy. "It's beautiful," Aria replied automatically, returning to her book.

One night Jenna was working on placing a river into her landscape project when she saw Aria tug a box into the room. "What's that?" she asked. "How did you sneak it in? Are you sure a nurse didn't see?" Now that Aria was breaking some policies, Jenna's vocal chords were warmed up.

But Aria was unusually silent as she ripped the tape off the cardboard flaps—revealing three cartons of explosives.

"Are those bombs?" Jenna nearly shrieked, her paintbrush staining the floor with blue paint mixed with some white.

The chortle that vibrated Aria's lips was not Aria's. "Calm down. They're just fireworks."

"And what are you planning on doing with them?" Jenna began chewing her pinky nail and stepping back until her back bumped into the wall.

"Shooting them out the window, silly."

"But there are bars!"

"Shut up!"

Aria didn't remember much of anything from that night, besides Mona appearing at the doorway as Bethany, recently released from her injury treatment, burst into the scene, causing Jenna to scream. Suddenly, Aria was Aria again, and she fought with Bethany over the box when _bang_!

"Mona made me do it!" Bethany cried out in emotional pain as she ran out of sight, leaving Aria dazzled.

Before Aria blacked out from the smoke that overcame her lungs in the one large burst, she could hear Mona's voice tell her, "Some people are unreplaceable."

Bethany never apologized for blinding Jenna and leaving the blame to Aria. But then again, why would she—when it was Mona, disguised in Aria's skin, giving her the orders?

…

After those events, Mona stopped bothering Aria. Alison checked in to Radley, and Aria thought maybe, just maybe, her life would return to some kind of normalcy.

But then the night after Ali checked out, Aria was outside Radley. Mona led her there—and right to Alison, who was running through the woods, a shortcut to the train station.

"Alison, stop!" Aria cried out as Alison stumbled over a tree root.

Seeing Aria spotlighted by the moon's light caused Alison's nerves to jangle in her chest. "Aria? What are you—?"

"Oh, shut up." Mona stepped out from the darkness. "We're here to finish the hell _you_ started."

"Wha—" Alison panted, putting a hand up to her chest—and finally noticed the nasty cut on her elbow. "What did I do?"

It was like Aria gained an invisible force of aggression from Mona that pushed her to step forward and growl, "You sent me to Radley, Alison. Or don't you remember the girl you pushed on the sidewalk and left with a broken wrist?"

Rather than answer, Alison bolted up onto her feet—and sprinted. Instincts flooded Aria at that moment as she picked up the pace as well, until she was able to tackle Alison onto the ground.

"Ow," Alison whined as she shoved Aria. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry! But I need to go!"

"No!" Aria snatched Alison's ankle, her body thudding onto the ground again. As she struggled against a squirming Alison, she didn't know what to say anymore. She just wanted something more, but she wasn't aware of what she would ask if Alison went limp.

"Smash her head into the rock!" Mona cheered on Aria as Aria grabbed Alison's opposite calf for a stronger hold. "Snap her ankles!"

"Not helping, Mona," Aria grumbled between clenched teeth—which Alison kicked with her converse-clad foot. "Can't you just tell me sorry and _mean_ it, Alison? And I promise I'll never tell anyone that you were in Radley."

Alison, her face inflamed from exertion and fury, managed to kick out of Aria's hold and stand up, brushing the damp leaves off her jeans. "You're never going to get out to tell anybody," she hissed, and ran away before Aria could attack her again.

Aria gave one more chance, and it took the rest of her energy to grasp Alison's wrist—the right one, the one Alison snapped on Aria. The Mona beside Aria begged her to twist it, break it, bring her the same pain she brought onto Aria.

But Aria dropped it. After a fleeting moment of confusion and bewilderment over Aria's defeat, Alison darted between the trees until the only proof of her existence in the forest were the crunching twigs and leaves that quieted down the farther she ran.

"I told you to kill her!" Mona screeched.

"But I don't want to be _you_." Aria turned to face Mona. "I know what you did, Mona. You wanted to kill me. Well, I'm too nice to return the favor you didn't get to complete on me." She approached Mona so that her shoulder was nearly touching Mona's. "And I'm so over dealing with you."

It was a shame Aria didn't remember the moment Mona disappeared into rustling leaves on the ground, or maybe she would have remembered that Mona was supposed to be dead in the first place.

…

"You killed me, Aria." Mona passed for an emotional sobbing act as she stood across from a stricken Aria. "Why would you do that?"

"I-I didn't kill you!" Aria stammered. "You're still here."

Just like that, Mona dabbed her eyes with her sleeve, and she returned to the devilish smirk she was renowned for. "That's because I enjoy haunting things."

Was it that easy, Aria thought, to get rid of Mona? Shutting her eyes, she wished that Mona was gone—but Mona was still there. Never would Aria have expected to come face-to-face with her condition, or to grow close to the entity that set out to end her.

But then Aria was reminded of all she had to lose by staying in Radley—Spencer, Hanna, Emily, Ezra, Mike, her chance at another life past elementary school—and clamped her eyelids shut again. This time she clenched her fists and, when she released the pent-up tension, she reopened her eyes. "You know what, Mona?" She couldn't have been more certain about anything else. "I'm so over dealing with you."

With that, Aria headed to the exit, and she could feel her heart rate pick up, like it didn't have to pump a heavy load anymore.

When she turned around, Mona was gone.


	18. Chapter 18: The Recovery

**A/N: Thank you all on your feedback! For those who asked for romantic relationships to happen, I'm planning on touching more on that in the sequel. For now, there's this chapter, then the end, then the epilogue that will lead into the sequel, which is still in the beginning stages of planning.**

 **I also went back into this story and edited any continuity errors. I'll upload those soon.**

 **Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoy this chapter.**

* * *

 **Chapter 18: The Recovery**

When Aria stepped out of the abandoned children's ward and into the fluorescent lighting of the empty hallway, she had to hold her elbows in her hands because of how much she was trembling. Liberation, it seemed, made her body quiver in what—anticipation? Fear? Suppressed longing? It may have been all of these things.

Because Mona was gone and Aria's understanding of her illness skyrocketed, Aria knew she could go home: A possibility that hadn't stuck to her since she first entered Radley.

A giggle reverberated off the walls as Aria scooted her slippers while pacing back and forth across the hallway; she wanted to calm down before returning to her friends with the good news. A chill started at the tip of Aria's spine and raced down it—that laugh sounded like Mona's.

Rapidly, Aria looked back and forth, but she was the only one in the hallway. She guessed Mona's physical appearance may be gone, but her soul was still lingering; Aria needed more to get rid of her now. Rather than wait for Mona to possibly appear, Aria scampered around the corner, finding her way back to civilization.

At that moment, Spencer, Hanna, and Emily were returning from their investigation of the fourth floor. "I told you, we need to find Aria, now!" Emily whispered sternly, cupping her forehead in her hand. "Mona's wiped her entire existence out of Radley. That's insane!"

Hanna's face whitened. "Maybe she did that because she wasn't expecting to return tonight…"

"What, to kill herself along with Aria, and leave no trace?" Emily's cheeks turned green.

"Or maybe it's not that at all," Spencer spoke for the first time since she clicked "Enter." Hanna and Emily impatiently waited for her to continue. "Maybe Mona doesn't exist because Aria is Mona."

"But that can't be!" Hanna immediately argued. "According to Aria, the doctors have acknowledged Mona."

Spencer bit her lip and pondered, but Emily was the one who said, "Maybe they found that was the only way they could get real information out of her."

Before the girls could debate further, the one with all the answers entered the room, the robe she was wearing and her paler-than-usual skin making her look like she'd passed on. "Aria!" they squealed in one moment, and covered Aria with their hugs. Her fleshy existence proved that she was not a ghost.

Hanna was the first to ask, "What the hell happened?"

Aria escaped the mass of arms and stepped further into the room, noticing the pile of notes that had transpired between her and A. "Everything," she scoffed, and shredded the papers into scraps that looked better in the garbage can.

"Like…?" Hanna prodded. "We need more than that!"

Sighing, Aria fell onto the edge of her bed. "It was Mona, she…she might be gone."

" _Might_ be?" The girls' expression became more and more worried.

Aria began the story from the beginning, and when she wrapped it up, she thought she saw a dark-haired figure smirking, arms crossed, at the doorway.

But when she blinked, it wasn't there.

…

Despite how they were made to feel, none of the four girls were truly psychotic. No, they were just normal people being controlled by something they had very little control of: Spencer couldn't stop her brain from craving Adderall. Hanna couldn't understand how not eating a morsel was killing her. Aria couldn't command when her personalities would switch. Emily couldn't change her parents' opinion of her, yet she listened to them because she wanted to win their acceptance. And just like any socially accepted physical illness, the girls healed. Spencer was able to compete for straight-As without the harmful aid of drugs. Hanna was learning that her perception of herself was not what it truly was. Aria was diligent with her medications and therapy and found comfort knowing that her double personality was under control. Emily was still trying to warm her parents' to the idea of her sexuality, with no luck so far, but she was out of a place that believed a part of her soul was fixable. Through their time at Radley together, the girls came to realize that they weren't the crazy ones. They were just like anyone else with an ability and will to heal.

But as of right now, they still had a long way to get there.

A week after Aria's reveal had transpired, Spencer watched as her dad's fist held the pen that signed her way out of Radley. She wasn't afraid of leaving now, not when she was confident that her friends were going to get out in the near future. She'd taken the blood and urine tests and was clean; her withdrawal symptoms were over; her parents had confiscated any form of drugs that shouldn't be in the house and were going to monitor her more closely. Her parents were proud of her recovery, but she could never forget how they treated her before dropping her off here, not allowing her to explain. But as Spencer reminisced about it in the car that was taking her back home, she realized that she was holding a grudge against her side of the argument that, as she could see clearly now, contained a lot of flaws.

Back in her bedroom, Spencer began to unpack, and noticed the picture frames on her desk of her and the debate team, the people she'd thought were her friends. Never once did they try to contact her, not even when her parents were asking them for updates on her schoolwork. She guessed they must have cared a little, as they still bothered to keep her in the loop—but that may just be pity.

Slipping the photo out of the frame, she threw it into a drawer of photos she kept meaning to turn into a scrapbook. During her time at Radley, she did snap a couple of pictures with her friends on the cell phone she was limited to. Without another thought, she printed those and set them in the frame. It was obvious that they were in a hospital, as each of them had on the Radley robes. But until they were all out and free, this was all she had left of her time at the institution.

A sense of freedom rushing over her, Spencer fell back on her bed and let her back sink into the mattress. It was a Saturday, and she couldn't wait to go back to school. She made a promise that she would visit her friends every Friday at Radley until they were all out, but until that happened, she was going to continue living out the dreams that had been put on hold. Cracking open her physics book, she began to review series and parallel circuits.

Emily was the next to leave Radley, a week and a half after Spencer. The therapist had told her, "I am completely convinced that you are cured, Emily, and your true self has been restored." She'd thrown on a fake smile and let her parents fawn over her after they signed the release forms before allowing her lips relief. Of course she was happy that she was going home, but how was she going to deal with her recovery that never really happened? She didn't want to lie to herself anymore and wait the rest of senior year and the summer before college to hide herself from the world. She loved who she was; the torturous "treatment" at Radley made her realize that. There was no doubt in her mind anymore, even with the controversy around it: she loved everything about women. She'd never felt a desire to be romantically attached to a boy, but she thought Jamie Singer in sixth grade was the most beautiful person in the world, and wanted to ask her to the middle school dance. The girl she left behind, Maya, understood that about Emily, and had sent letters to her in Radley about how sorry she was that they being caught was what sent Emily away—but her parents were the crazy ones, not her.

The first thing Emily did at home, after setting her suitcase in her bedroom, was throw on her swimsuit and burn excesses of mixed energy towards her parents in the pool. As she was drying off, a girl with curly black hair approached her. "I heard you were back, and I knew you'd be here…"

A blush encased Emily's cheeks, as she never thought she'd have the desire to kiss Maya ever again; she had feared in Radley, sometimes, that her sexuality was going to be knocked out of her. "Maya," she said, barely able to control the smile that overwhelmed her face. After Emily warned Maya that she was still dripping in chlorinated water, Maya said she didn't care and threw her arms around Emily in a hug. No kissing at all; Maya understood the charade Emily had to put up until she thought of something that could fix everything. "I missed you."

Aria was the next to go, two weeks later. "I can't believe I'm going to be alone," Hanna murmured as she helped Aria pack the little that she had, except she wasn't really helping: she was examining the muscle that had grown back on her wrists.

"You'll be out in no time, Hanna," Aria reassured her. " _Caleb_ is certain of your progress."

"Why do you say his name like that?"

Aria's only answer was a smirk.

"Okay, I get it, he's cute."

The suitcase Aria had stuffed in her closet was covered in dust, and she found relief in batting it off. "Who's picking you up?" Hanna inquired as she crossed her legs and began poking the rebuilt muscle on her calves.

Aria's heart rate picked up at the question, because she couldn't even believe the answer. "My parents."

Hanna didn't want to pry, so she only asked, "Will you be going back to school?"

"I hope so. Spencer is going to make a convincing case to the principle to let me in as a senior, but assign me anything I can't test out of in a promise that I will work my butt off in the summer."

Hanna chipped a bit of sea green polish off her fingernail. "Will you?"

"After years of not doing anything in here… I am more than willing. I wouldn't mind taking a year off to finish high school before going to college."

The heart beating in Aria's chest began to race as she got to the nurse's station and stood next to her suitcase, waiting. She couldn't believe she was leaving, with a promise to continue therapy and her newly prescribed medications. Everything was going better now that she understood it all. When she saw the SUV pull up in front of the doors, her heart skipped a beat. Rather than have a reunion in the lobby, Aria gripped the handle of her suitcase with a shaky hand and stepped out of the automatic doors.

A man and a woman Aria could only remember bits and pieces of in her memory stepped out of the car. The man was graying above the ears, but the woman, being a little younger, hadn't reached any advancing stage of graying yet. They didn't look as different as Aria remembered them to be—just older—but she looked at them as strangers anyway.

When the married couple noticed the young woman standing there, the woman, Ella, covered her hands with her mouth. "You're all grown up," she began to cry, and Aria was expecting to be encased in their hugs any moment. The man, Byron, put an arm on Ella's back as his eyes teared up as well. "Last time we say you, you were this high."

But rather than rush her, they waited for her to say something. Aria could picture it clearly—sitting in her mother's lap as she messily braided Ella's long, straight hair; riding on Byron's shoulders—but then she remembered the last few years when their existence faded in Aria's memory. Braiding her mother's hair turned into her mother's hands gripping her tiny wrists to restrain her from whatever tantrum she was throwing; riding on her father's shoulders became him locking her in her bedroom until she learned to behave. Then it became them leaving her here after visiting her for a few months, staring at her as though she wasn't their own anymore, until they realized that they still had a son and losing a daughter no longer seemed like a tragic thing.

After her brain churned through her emotional turmoil, Aria looked back at these parents who'd grown just as much as she had. Would parents who didn't care cry over their daughter? Now that Aria was granted a new beginning, she was a firm believer of their existence—so she bit her lip and nodded her head, and was overwhelmed by their arms as soon as she took a step forward. "We missed you so much, sweetie," they murmured along with, "We thought we lost you."

With these people who felt like foreigners to her instead of her parents, Aria closed her eyes tightly and dreamed of what she always wanted as a kid: a normal family that loved her instead of abandoned her. For a second she made herself believe that, but in a second, it was gone.

Within another three weeks, Hanna was eating full meals and finally getting the hang of keeping track of her calories to make sure she was eating enough to be healthy but not too much that she gained weight. Radley had a decent gym, she came to realize, as Caleb suggested that once she gained some weight back, he wanted her to try exercising to see if it made her feel more confident, even if it was a miniscule amount. As her healing process was still progressing slowly, she was restricted to how much exercise she could do.

Emily, Spencer, and Aria sent letters to her a couple times a week, keeping her updated on teenage life back in Rosewood. _The principal said if you do well in your classes second semester and take summer classes, he'll let you graduate with us!_ Spencer had written to her recently. That's right, Hanna remembered, glancing at the calendar. There was no way she could finish any first semester classes now. But Hanna was determined to have the laziest summer before heading off to college—which she'd applied to, as Spencer had helped them all with applications a couple weeks ago, even Aria. "It's worth a try," Spencer had reassured Aria. So Hanna picked up her pen and wrote, _What if I work my butt off all of winter break—how many classes do you think I can finish?_

It wasn't long until Hanna was waiting in the lobby with her bags, ready to be sent home—but, like Aria, required to keep them updated with her treatment. "Thanks for waiting with me," Hanna said to Caleb as her palms sweated onto the handle of her suitcase.

When Hanna saw her mom's car pull up, she hugged Caleb as he said, "You can do this, Hanna." He meant "fully recover." "I've only been here for a semester, and I don't think I'll ever meet someone as stubborn as you." He then gave her his email and phone if she ever needed to talk again, and Hanna found her eyes watering. What did she ever do to deserve this kindness? For the past couple years, she'd been a nasty person to some of the nerdier kids in school in an attempt to raise her popularity. She came to Radley with a strong shell because she expected to deal with people who treated her like crap, as punishment, almost. She couldn't believe she was desperate enough to gain popularity to turn into a bully. Would Sean even be interested in her now?

Sean. Swept up in her treatment with Caleb and getting out with her friends and keeping her sanity, she'd forgotten about him. She wasn't sure if she even wanted a boyfriend at the moment. But by the way he never tried to get in contact with her, she assumed she was a single woman since the moment she stepped into Radley.

As she was reunited with her mom, she let herself cry—but not too long, because she didn't like how it made her eyes puffy. Ms. Marin, teary-eyed, commented on how great Hanna looked. Hanna chose to agree—and for more than second, she believed it.

Like the others, Hanna left Radley—and she never looked back.


	19. Chapter 19: The End

**Chapter 19: The End**

January. The beginning of a new year and a new semester: The semester Aria and Hanna were going to attend school after playing the biggest game of catch-up. Aria stepped out of Hanna's luxury car, her plaid flats holding her up on the pavement. Rosewood High School, especially with all the students hovering around, was overwhelming, but Aria, after going through the school with Spencer over winter break, was ready to conquer her first day as a high school student—and she was able to be a senior along with the rest of the girls, thanks to Spencer dedicating her time to Aria (and sometimes Hanna, if she needed it) to get her through most of what they could in the time they were given.

Now she smoothed out a crease in her baby-blue dress and pulled her beige cardigan closer around her. "I don't know if I like this," she murmured, tugging at her clothes. "Did my mom ask you what _you_ wore and bought me the same things?"

Hanna glanced up and down at Aria's fashion choice for her first day. "I think it's cute!" she chirped, linking her arm with Aria's as she caught sight of Emily and Spencer in front of the concrete steps.

"That's what I thought." Aria rolled her eyes and made a mental note to buy her own clothes instead of letting her mom decide what she wanted her all-grown-up daughter to be like. In fact, living with the parents she barely remembered was confusing, to say the least.

" _Your mom and I have your room cleaned up. All of your toys missed you," Byron explained as they drove to Aria's old but new home. Aria wanted to make a snarky comment like, "Then why didn't you just send them over? That way you could have gotten a guest room," but she pursed her lips and nodded instead._

 _Ella turned around in her seat so that she was facing Aria. "Are you excited to be home?" Her brown eyes glinted hopefully, powerfully; Aria began to sense the desperation her parents were feeling to please the daughter they left behind._

 _Aria wasn't sure whether to shrug or shake her head, so she just smiled. "It's definitely going to take some time to get used to."_

Since that day, her parents had been catering to her like she was one of her fragile porcelain dolls. It wasn't until she asked her parents about bringing Mike home and away from boarding school that her opinion of them soured.

"He belongs there, sweetie," Ella had said while putting the new set of clothes she'd bought for Aria away. "He was being such a bother to his teachers—it was the principal who recommended it!"

It was that moment that Aria had realized there was a dangerous pattern with her parents: They couldn't keep children that weren't close to perfect. Was it possible that there were other Montgomery children? Aria wouldn't know because they would have been shipped away.

Feeling overwhelmed and flustered all of a sudden, Aria had stepped outside and made a call. A few minutes later, she was in front of his door.

" _Thanks for letting me come over." Adjusting the purse slung over her shoulder, Aria stepped past Ezra into the foyer she vaguely remembered. "This will be quick, I promise."_

 _Though all she really wanted was to escape her parents for a while, she had other pressing matters that she might as well get done to avoid going home. "I just wanted to give you the ending to your book," she explained. The last time she saw Ezra was the day he met Mona slitting her wrists open then drove her back to Radley._

 _Ezra's shoulders tensed and he shoved his hands in his pockets, awkward. "I decided not to write it."_

 _The journal Aria had tugged out of her purse felt heavy in her hand. "Oh." She began to shove the journal back into her bag. "Well… That's it, I guess."_

That was the last time she had spoken to Ezra. She guessed it was weird to have a friend more than a couple years older anyway.

But Aria still hadn't wanted to go home, so she pulled out the new smartphone her parents had gifted her with and called Hanna.

" _Hey!" Hanna piped. "Perfect timing. The nurse just gave me my phone."_

 _Sighing, Aria didn't have to say she was feeling down because Hanna already knew: "What's wrong?"_

 _Chewing her lip, Aria glanced down at her bare fingernails, probably bland next to whatever color Hanna was wearing now. "I just left Ezra's and… It was weird."_

 _Hanna sat down on her favorite couch and jabbed at her bowl of strawberries. "Why?"_

" _It just was. Suddenly I was aware of everything: how he must think I'm insane after the last time he saw me, and the years between us. It's not common for people our age to be friends with people in their twenties, is it?"_

 _It was Hanna's turn to bite her lip. "Some do… But no, I don't think it is. Do you want to be friends with him?"_

 _The more Aria pondered it in the car she was driving despite not having a license yet, the more she let the truth peek out. "I don't think so… He was just some nice guy who wanted to do me a favor and expose more truth and understanding to the world, I guess."_

 _It was good while it lasted, she supposed as the engine roared to life and she drove away for the last time._

As Hanna and Aria approached Spencer and Emily, Hanna double-checked her bag to make sure her lunch and snacks were all gathered together. She was feeling better, but still had moments of relapse where she wouldn't eat for a day. The uncomfortable, irritating sensation of an angry stomach called her back to the pantry, though. Mostly, she had accepted that it was good that she was eating again. But a part of her hated her for it. Hanna was having trouble ridding that part.

Right now, that part told her to dump the carrot sticks in the trash and skip her afternoon snack. After all, a few less calories couldn't hurt, right? Recognizing this train of thought, she mentally slapped herself across the face. It was these excuses that brought her to Radley in the first place.

She kept in contact with Caleb, of course, keeping him updated with her treatment and school and friends. He was much more comfortable to talk to than Sean, her ex-boyfriend that she had a nasty fallout with when she came back.

 _When Hanna settled in her room, setting Dot next to her pillow and rearranging the makeup at her vanity desk, she sank into her comforter and stared at the ceiling for a few minutes. It was like she had been on a prolonged vacation she didn't want to go on. To be back home was the only thing she could have asked for for Christmas. Now that she was, she guessed she was getting nothing this year._

 _Pulling out the phone she also missed so dearly, as Radley had given a few minutes once a week for anyone to use their cell, Hanna opened her contact information and saw the dozens of names listed. Naomi, Riley, Lucas, Jenna… Sean was at the very top of the list, one of the emergency contact numbers as well. Pulling air into her lungs and holding it there, she began dialing as she let it pass through her lips. Calm. Collected. Serene._

 _The number went to voicemail. "Hey, Sean… It's Hanna. I'm back from rehab, and I want to see you. Call me back, please." She tried to contact him two more times that day and he still didn't answer._

In short, Hanna was leaving Lush after a therapeutic shopping spree when she saw Sean with a group of his guy friends on the other side of the street. Hanna had confronted him, and he had told her all about how he didn't date psycho girls. "I was sick," Hanna had explained, appalled and disgusted by the man she had desperately wanted to be her boyfriend for years. He had then told her that the only reason he had expressed concern to her mom was because Hanna was becoming too bony to handle, and wasn't seeing things that weren't there a symptom of being crazy? In the end, Hanna had broken a heel crushing it into Sean's toe, but it was worth the pair of Manolos.

Caleb was a good friend, and trustworthy, and she had Spencer, Aria, and Emily. She didn't need anyone else, especially anyone that made her turn to the dangers she'd faced, and she deleted all of the contacts off her phone except for those that truly mattered.

"Hey," Spencer said while encasing Aria and Hanna in a hug. "It's our two brave warriors prepared to conquer the day."

As Spencer focused on herself and how she wanted to be in Rosewood, she went back to school as soon as she could, which was the following Monday. She was expecting judgment, but when she went to the debate club meeting that was always held on Mondays, she was blocked out. Because of her her history with drugs, and not considering her rehab, she couldn't be a part of her favorite activity anymore.

The loss was devastating, and though Spencer had more time to focus on schoolwork, debate was her break from everything else. So when Emily was released, Spencer asked her if she could teach her competitive swimming.

" _I can't believe I never thought of swimming before!" Spencer exclaimed as she pulled herself over the ledge of the pool, breathing heavily. As therapeutic as field hockey was, swimming was new to Spencer, and she felt refreshed._

" _You were pretty good out there!" Emily praised as she took her hair out her cap and squeezed out excess water._

 _Hungrily, Spencer gazed at the lane of water. "A couple more laps?" she asked, and didn't even wait for Emily's response before diving in—even though it wasn't the diving end of the lane._

" _Spencer!" Emily shrieked, afraid for a second, but Spencer was far from stupid, and she knew not to dive steeply in. She waved quickly when she came up for some air, then furiously sped away as though she was in need of burning out all of her negative energy._

When winter break came and all of them were out of Radley, Spencer spent her time helping Hanna and Aria study. With all the things she was busying herself with, Spencer noticed how the craving for anything that would give her artificial power had rarely popped up. It looked like Spencer had found her balance where she wasn't overwhelmed to the point of turning to prescription medicines. But it was still a part of her, that tense, stressed-out, spiraling teenager. The motivation to stay out of that whirlpool forced her to pick and choose a few things in life rather than doing it all.

One time, she had gone to the store to buy some notebooks and folders for Aria and Hanna when she ran into Toby. "Hey!" she said with a smile. "How are you?"

Toby wasn't in his uniform, so Spencer guessed he was off duty. "Just leaving, actually."

Spencer was confused, and shifted the bag to her other hand. "Where?"

His lips were lightly pursed together. "Rosewood."

It turned out he had quit the force last week, and wanted to pursue his passion for architecture on the west coast. "It's someplace new, someplace I think I might like to be." So Spencer hugged and thanked him for all he had done, and he expressed how lucky they were to have avoided living in opposing jail cells.

"We're ready to study hard!" Hanna chimed, squeezing Aria's hand. "Even though deep down, I really hate school. It's from all of those TV shows, I swear." She acknowledged Aria. "You're lucky you haven't been brainwashed by the media."

When the bell rang, Emily hopped down from the concrete ledge she was sitting on and took Hanna's arm, as they had the same class first period. Spencer took Aria to show her where her first class was, even though Aria insisted that she knew where she was going; but Spencer wasn't going to let her old/new friend get swept into Rosewood High just yet, not until she was confident she had her footing.

As Emily and Hanna strolled down the halls, some people giving Hanna glares or awe-struck stares, Emily's heart skipped a beat when she saw the dark skin, a color she loved, complimented by the purple beanie on her black curls. "Hey, Maya," she greeted her like she would any friend, except the implication was more.

"Hey, Em," Maya said in singsong, her shoulder brushing Emily's as they passed, sending a shiver up Emily's spine.

Ever since she and Maya had reunited at the pool, she had told her parents that she was going out with some friends when she was only going out with Maya. One time they went to the lake during sunset and snacked on ice cream. They'd sneak kisses when they were sure no one was looking. Sometimes it frustrated Maya, but she understood that it was better than Emily being locked up again. Emily was still figuring out how to bring up her sexuality to her parents without unearthing the bad memories surrounding it.

Fortunately, all four girls had the same lunch period, which they were used to having anyway. As Aria slammed her locker shut, she met everyone else at Emily's and felt her pulse race under the silver necklace dangling around her throat.

By the lack of people in the hallway, it would be the first time she'd walk into a room full of her peers later than the rest of them. They might stare, whisper, laugh at all of them. Aria would be able to see it because no one would be shoving her around on their way to class. She thought she was nervous returning to a society she couldn't remember being a part of, but this was just as nerve-wracking.

Hanna held her hand, and Spencer did the same. Emily held Spencer's and Hanna's so that it became a circle. "We can do this," Hanna encouraged them. "Not many people get to say they escaped Radley and were completely sane."

As they made their way down the hallways of Rosewood High, Aria thought maybe Spencer could feel her elbow quake in hers, as they had locked arms to bring each other support. But she rolled her head around on her neck to ease up the tension, and strongly held her chin up, so that when they entered the cafeteria—

Some people glanced up and acknowledged the Radley survivors with eyebrows raised in curiosity, or lips curled in disgust or disbelief. But no one pointed, no one laughed. They got to an empty table and Aria let go of her breath. She hadn't noticed her fingers were trembling until she took out her salad from her lunch box. Hanna reached out to her and placed her hand over Aria's, giving her a pacifying smile.

When Spencer set her tray down at the lunch table a few minutes later, anxiety produced wrinkles in her forehead that were enough to make Hanna prod, "What just happened between us walking in here and now?"

Inhaling aggressively, Spencer put her fingers to her temples and stared at someone behind Hanna, provoking Hanna and Aria to turn around in their seats.

"Did you see—" Emily began to say anxiously as she sat down, but was interrupted by Hanna.

"Alison?"

The Queen Bee of Rosewood was back in school as well. "When did she get back?" Hanna asked, still in disbelief that the blonde was strutting across the cafeteria.

"I have no idea," Spencer replied, and stopped chewing her bottom lip before it became irritated. "I haven't seen her since last year…"

As Aria curiously watched Alison, the blue eyes that had angered her as a child landed on her, and Alison halted near the cafeteria line. Aria continued to watch her classmate out of the corner of her eye as she grabbed a flavored water bottle and bolted out of the cafeteria.

"Why had Alison gone to Radley?" Emily whispered.

Aria kept her eyes trained on the corner Alison had disappeared around. Sparks of memories from the summer flickered: Alison keeping her lips sealed most of the summer, until Aria snuck a peak at her diaries and thought maybe she was there to hide an unplanned pregnancy. But nothing ever happened to confirm that; Alison was as flat as can be. Even when Aria confronted her in the woods, Alison didn't reveal a single thing, other than that she was racing to the train station to escape from—what? If it was enough to send Alison fleeing…

But Aria sent those thoughts into the back of her head, where she left them to rot. She pressed her top and bottom eyelashes together, heavy with mascara, and instructed her brain to keep those thoughts chained up tightly.

She wasn't going to let Alison send her away again.

* * *

 **A/N: Despite the title, this is not the last chapter. Keeping reading...**


	20. Chapter 20: Nothing Ends in Rosewood

**Chapter 20: Nothing Ever Ends in Rosewood**

She'd never had to run in heels before.

Her hand, adorned with bleeding knuckles, grabbed the brick corner to aid her in rounding it. She stuffed the long, dark hair she'd been unable to tie back behind her ears. The longer she ran down the alleyways, the bleaker they became. Soon she was unable to let her eyes water without being blinded.

Eventually she reached a dead end and pressed her back against the crumbling brick. Her knees shook, threatening to collapse her. When her hand wiped the sweat and smeared makeup off her cheek, it created streaks across her face that looked like mixed watercolor paints, and stains on her body-tight dress from placing her hand on her abdomen to control her breathing.

She didn't remember how she got here.

"Aria…" A male voice echoed above the tops of buildings. "If that's your real name, you lying bitch…"

The voice was closer than she expected it to be, and her heels nearly jumped out of their straps. Helplessly she slid to the ground and curled up, no longer caring that the brick stabbed into her back. She brought one hand to her mouth to muffle the cries that she'd been holding back since the moment he pushed her into the table and she ran away. She tried to move her other arm, but she was sure the shoulder was dislocated when she had fallen on it.

And no one in that seedy placed had bothered to help her, no one offering ice for the bruise that had already formed around her elbow.

Aria shut her sore eyes and thought back to everything she loved: her friends Hanna, Emily, and Spencer; her brother, Mike; her boyfriend, Andrew; her reconnected friendship with Ezra.

"There you are."

A menacing shadow with overgrown, dirty blond hair falling into glowing blue eyes stepped into Aria's view. It didn't seem to care that it had already did a number on her physically. What more did it want? Was it looking to be charged with homicide?

When it reached down and grabbed her bruised elbow, Aria took what might be her last breath and yelled "No!" while she brought her knee up between its legs.

* * *

 **A/N: That's the end! (For now.) This chapter was officially the beginning of the sequel!**

 **In the sequel, more will be shown on how Aria is adapting to life out of Radley; Spencer will be having some family troubles; Hanna is worried about falling into a relapse despite being happy with herself and her relationships, including a budding romance with Caleb; and Emily is continuing her romance with Maya, but still hasn't found a way to tell her parents. The question "what was Alison doing in Radley?" will also be answered...along with many other surprises I will not foreclose right now!**

 **If there is something you are dying to see happen in the sequel, feel free to leave a suggestion in a review. I do read your guys' comments and take them into consideration. However, I can't promise that I can follow through with everything.**

 **Thanks so much for reading, guys! I'll be planning out the sequel more thoroughly. Until I begin writing it, I'll be continuing with my future Ezria fic, "Where We Are Supposed to Be."**


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